Design of a 2-finger hand exoskeleton for finger stiffness measurements

Recent studies of human arm movements have suggested that the control of stiffness may be important both for maintaining stability and for achieving differences in movement accuracy. Several studies in the robotic field demonstrated that grasp stiffness is useful for modelling and controlling manipulators but, even though it is accredited that having models of the human finger impedance would be very desirable for the control of anthropomorphous robot's hands, relatively few studies have focused on finger and hand stiffness. To allow the measurement of such entities at the finger level, an appropriate device capable of applying fast force transients while at the same time be able to monitor the finger movements is required. The work presented in this paper is a very detailed report about the design of a new hand exoskeleton system that will be used in our future works to investigate the finger stiffness range in different grasping postures and conditions.

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