Bio-mimetic study on pinching motions of a dual-finger model with synergistic actuation of antagonist muscles

In this paper, we study co-activation of digitorum muscles while perform stable pinching and posture regulation tasks of an object by using dual fingers. The fingers have 2 D.O.F. joints and are actuated by nonlinear redundant digitorum muscles to mimic human-like pinching movements. Firstly, we illustrate the kinematics and the dynamics of the overall system, which consider not only the fingers and an object, but also three muscles for each finger to actuate the finger links. Secondly, we consider nonlinear muscle property based on several physiological studies, and propose sensory-motor control rule to the muscles in order to realize stable pinching simultaneously with posture regulation by introducing internal force term induced by co-activation between flexor digitorums and extensor digitorums to modulate the damping factor in joint space. We verify our study by numerical simulations and conclude that this dual fingers system can realize human-like stable pinching and posture regulation