Extensive Human Training for Robot Skill Synthesis: Validation on a Robotic Hand

We propose a framework for skill synthesis for robots that exploits the human capacity to learn novel control tasks. The conceptual idea is to incorporate the target robotic platform into the experimenter´s body schema so that it can be controlled effortlessly as if the robot were a part of the body. Once this stage is achieved, the dexterity on a task exhibited with the new external limb -the robot- can be used for designing controllers for the task under consideration. This article exemplifies the proposed framework by showing the derivation of an effective open-loop controller that can manipulate two balls with the fingers of a 16-DOF robotic hand.