Evaluation of grasp efficiency based on muscle activity estimation by anthropomorphic robot fingers

This study aims to quantitatively evaluate product usability in terms of the efficiency of muscle activity. A musculoskeletal finger model that considers anatomical features of fingers is built and the muscle activity when the fingers move is estimated. In this paper, new robot fingers which have human mimetic structure are also presented. The proposed fingers mimic the size, degree of freedom and fingertip structure of humans. The muscle activity when an object is grasped by human fingers can be estimated by using the developed anthropomorphic robot fingers.