Performance Test of Fingers on 3D Printed Myoelectric Prosthetic Hand

Abstract

At present, research on myoelectric hands is growing throughout the world. Some aspects of the bionic hand that are widely researched are the mechanism of the finger, actuator, and power consumption. The mechanism of fingers in many scientific articles examines how the motion and function of the bionic fingers / robotic hands approach normal motion and function of the human finger. There are three mechanism systems commonly found in both scientific articles and products on the market, namely springs, links, and gears. Most existing finger mechanisms simplify the function of fingers into two joints, MCP and PIP, while joint DIPs are made rigid and form a certain angle. This paper presents MCP and PIP angle instrumentation methods by measuring the strokes of linear actuators and the power consumed by the actuator. The MCP and PIP angles are acquired with the camera and then pass through the four-point color tracking algorithm in metacarpal, MCP joints, PIP joints, and joint DIPs. Tracking is conducted with computer vision using MATLAB-Simulink. Tracking is performed on myoelectric fingers and compared to normal human fingers when grasping. Linear actuator has a stroke length of 20 mm. The position of the linear actuator stroke is obtained by using feedback from the linear potentiometer contained in the linear actuator. Actuator strokes and flowing electric currents are measured using a microcontroller and sent using serial transmit to the computer for data acquisition systems.