A Low-Cost EMG-Controlled Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand for Power and Precision Grasp

In this paper the use of a commercial EMG armband for the motion control of a prototype hand prosthesis is proposed. The mechanical design is based on an open source six degree-of-freedom hand. Some modifications from the original design are proposed, mainly in the actuation and power transmission devices to reduce the prototype's costs and to provide a major mobility to the thumb to adapt the motion to the shape of the grasped object. Unlike some similar prototypes previously reported and considering that the proposed application requires portability, the use of a PC for the acquisition and processing of the EMG data has been replaced by a portable hardware system based on the master/slave architecture. The master device is a Raspberry Pi-based subsystem interfaced with the EMG armlet for gathering and classifying information from the user's muscular activity. The slave device is an ATmega328 microcontroller-based subsystem that defines the movements of the robotic hand from the information collected and processed by the master device. Experimental results are presented to evaluate the performance of the EMG-controlled hand prosthesis carrying out different types of grasping tasks. (c) 2019 Nalecz Institute of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.