Blackfingers a Sophisticated Hand Prothesis

Our goal is to develop the low level control system for an artificial hand ”Blackfingers”. Blackfingers was thought to have two main applications: as humanoid robot’s hand or as a human hand prothesis. In this last application our intent is to realize a device more sophisticated respect the actual commerce prothesis. Also in our intention is to use some biological paradigms to create a human like reflex control easy to be interfaced also with the human nervous system. In this paper we illustrate the properties and the morphology of a human like neural reflex controller, used to set the stiffness and joint positions of our artificial hand. In particular we explain, by simulations results, its ability to emulate the myotatic human reflex, and its capacity to learn in real time the best control strategy.