In the last few years, the number of projects studying the human hand from the robotic point of view has increased rapidly, due to the growing interest in academic and industrial applications. Nevertheless, the complexity of the human hand given its large number of degrees of freedom (DoF) within a significantly reduced space requires an exhaustive analysis, before proposing any applications. The aim of this paper is to provide a complete summary of the kinematic and dynamic characteristics of the human hand as a preliminary step towards the development of hand devices such as prosthetic/robotic hands and exoskeletons imitating the human hand shape and functionality. A collection of data and constraints relevant to hand movements is presented, and the direct and inverse kinematics are solved for all the fingers as well as the dynamics; anthropometric data and dynamics equations allow performing simulations to understand the behavior of the finger. 1. Introduction The human hand is a complex mechanism; it has a wide range of DoFs, allowing a great variety of movements. In recent years, as robotics has advanced, significant efforts have been devoted to the development of hand devices. The two main related application fields are prosthetic/robotic hands and exoskeletons. On one side, robotic hands are developed with the characteristics complying to those of the human hand, taking advantage of its variety of movements, thereby avoiding the use of a large number of end effectors when performing tasks with different objects (e.g., Eurobot [1], Robonaut [2]). On the other side, exoskeletons are designed to fit onto the human hand, aiming at enhancing performance in the carrying out of daily activities (e.g., improving astronauts’ hand performance during extravehicular activity [3]) or supporting the rehabilitation stage of hand injury recovery. There are currently many different projects underway. Schabowsky et al. [4] introduced a newly developed Hand Exoskeleton Rehabilitation Robot (HEXORR), which was designed to provide a full range of motion for all fingers. NASA and General Motors presented a prototype of the Human Grasp Assist device [5] (K-Glove). Worsnopp et al. [6] introduced a finger exoskeleton for hand rehabilitation following strokes, to facilitate movement, especially pinch. Another project is being developed by Ho et al. [7]: their exoskeleton hand is EMG driven, again for rehabilitation, but working on all the fingers. All of these projects present a different number of DoFs and different structures, but in general they are developed with the
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