Smart Control Of A Soft Robotic Hand Prosthesis

The target of this thesis disertation is to develop a new Smart control of a soft robotic hand prosthesis for the soft robotic hand prosthesis called ProMain Hand, which is characterized by:(i) flexible interaction with grasped object, (ii) and friendly-intuitive interaction between human and robot hand. Flexible interaction results from the synergies between rigid bodies and soft bodies, and actuation mechanism. The ProMain hand has three fingers, each one is equipped with three phalanges: proximal, medial and distal. The proximal and medial are built with rigid bodies,and the distal is fabricated using a deformable material. The soft distal phalange has a new smart force sensor, which was created with the aim to detect contact and force in the fingertip, facilitating the control of the hand. The friendly intuitive human-hand interaction is developed to facilitate the hand utilization. The human-hand interaction is driven by a controller that uses the superficial electromyographic signals measured in the forearm employing a wearable device. The wearable device called MyoArmband is placed around the forearm near the elbow joint. Based on the signals transmitted by the wearable device, the beginning of the movement is automatically detected, analyzing entropy behavior of the EMG signals through artificial intelligence. Then, three selected grasping gesture are recognized with the following methodology: (i) learning patients entropy patterns from electromyographic signals captured during the execution of selected grasping gesture, (ii) performing a support vector machine classifier, using raw entropy data extracted in real time from electromyographic signals.