Optimal design of dexterous prosthetic hand with five-joint thumb and fingertip tactile sensors based on novel precision grasp metric

Current linkage-driven prosthetic hands still show limitations in aspects such as the thumb design and fingertip sensor. Moreover, linkage-driven prosthetic hands still lack quantitative precision grasp quality. In this study, we developed a novel thumb structure with coupled abduction–adduction and pronation–supination movement in the trapeziometacarpal joint. We also developed a fully integrated fingertip tactile sensor with all components embedded in the distal phalanx designed to facilitate in-hand precision manipulation. Furthermore, we devised a new metric to evaluate the precision grasp quality based on the force conditions during grasp. On the basis of this metric, we optimized the geometry parameters of the thumb and index finger using the Monte Carlo method. The results show that, compared with the anthropomorphic trajectory measured from a human index, the proposed method improves the grasping ability by more than 10%. Finally, we developed a prototype prosthetic hand based on the proposed design methods and demonstrated by experiment that it was able to perform human-like thumb opposition and to pass both precision and power grasp tests.