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The human hand as an inspiration for robot hand development
Balasubramanian R., Santos V., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, New York, NY, 2014. 400 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319030-16-6)
Date Reviewed: Aug 28 2014

This thick book in advanced robotics has two parts: Part 1 is about the human hand, its structure and its control, while Part 2 is about designing robotic hands inspired by the human hand. It contains 24 chapters authored by researchers in medicine, neuroscience, biology, mechatronics, and robotics, just to cite a few of the involved expertise. The editor’s preface very clearly introduces the themes and explains the idea of the book, which originated after a successful workshop in 2009.

Part 1, “The Rich Complexity of the Human Hand and Its Control,” includes ten chapters that cover anatomy, muscle and tendon models, control, and force perception. Chapter 1, “Constraints and Flexibility in Cortical Control of the Hand,” by Schieber, explains the role of the primary motor cortex in finger movements and coordination. It analyzes the constraints between the fingers, both passive and active coupling, and explains them in terms of evolution. Since many grasping movements do not require independent finger movements, the cortical control uses a representation of a limited set of movement primitives and muscle synergies, and can tune them, enabling or preventing some neurons. This is challenging in the construction of brain-machine interfaces, since cortical neurons do not have an invariant activity for a given kinematics or dynamics feature of the movement.

The following three chapters explore digit coordination, finding the rotation angles of the finger joints, and muscle-tendon force transmission, completing a description of the human hand in terms of generating motion and force. Chapters 5 to 9 discuss tactile and proprioceptive feedback, focusing on themes that have been of interest to the haptic device community and are now important also in the brain-machine interface.

Chapter 10, “Classifying Human Hand Use and the Activities of Daily Living,” by Dollar, presents a taxonomy of manipulation and grasping connected to daily activities. The author adopts terms of rehabilitation therapy and adapts them to the use of robots in domestic and work environments. He classifies grasp types, the frequency in which they are used, and the variety of grasping strategies used to move the same object. This chapter gives terms for engineering hands and manipulation, and concludes the first part of the book.

Part 2 starts with a review of representative mechanical hands designed so far, and continues with designing an artificial hand by mimicking the biological one. Chapters 12 to 15 analyze tendons, dynamics, compliance, and stability of grasping, while components design is discussed in chapters 16 to 19, in particular for haptic devices and tactile sensors.

The following two chapters are about complete design and programming. In particular, chapter 20, “Biomimicry and the Design of Multigrasp Transradial Prostheses,” by Varol et al., covers the whole spectrum of designing a prosthetic lower arm. It observes how biomimetic design has to integrate other criteria to accommodate, for instance, for the lack of sensation that the amputee has from the prosthesis.

The final three chapters of the book offer a view on how to teach manipulation to a robot. Chapter 22, “Physical Human Interactive Guidance: Identifying Grasping Principles from Human Planned Grasps,” by Balasubramanian et al., explains a practical method that exploits physical interaction with a human. Chapter 23, “Pre-Grasp Interaction for Object Acquisition in Difficult Tasks,” by Chang and Pollard, explores how pre-grasp interaction helps in grasping objects, especially in cluttered environments. Finally, chapter 24, “Grasp Planning Using Low Dimensional Subspaces,” by Allen et al., concludes the book with the concept of eigengrasps, a way to study grasping in a low-dimensional space.

This book is quite unique in the sense that it puts together a large overview of the human hand structure and organization with many engineering developments of artificial hands. It is intended for researchers, even though a few chapters, such as chapter 1, could also benefit graduate students.

Globally, it represents the state of the art in many areas of robotics research, both for prosthesis and humanoid construction. Of course, since time passed from the workshop that inspired this book to the publication, more themes have emerged. Perhaps a missing part is about psychology; after building a human-inspired robotic hand, we also need human-inspired algorithms to make the best use of it. What is lacking here is why different manipulation strategies are used. Does it depend on the intended use of the object? On different physical properties? On social expectations and constraints?

That being said, new research directions would benefit from the wide development of good mechanical design and control principles that are authoritatively presented in this book.

Reviewer:  G. Gini Review #: CR142672 (1412-1032)
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