Online behavior tuning of anthropomorphic hands through bioinspired design and Virtual Model Control

Humans constantly modulate the mechanical compliance of their hands to enable complex behaviors, ranging from gentle guitar strumming to high-force hammer manipulation, including robust multi-object handling and dexterous in-hand manipulation. To achieve this, the hand’s rich mechanics through the joints and tendon routing are combined with distributed adaptive compliance arising from muscle structures and control. Collectively, these enable the hand’s diverse behavioral capabilities and its ability to maintain contact stability under sparse or uncertain knowledge of the contact state. Inspired by this, we propose a new design and control methodology for an anthropomorphic, tendon-driven robotic hand. Our biomimetic mechanical design, comprising artificial skin, biomimetic tendon routing, and series elastic actuation, defines the intrinsic envelope of achievable stiffness, force, and pose, defining the be-havioral range. Overlaid on this hardware, a virtual mechanical layer based on Virtual Model Control dynamically modulates the hand’s compliance. By emulating virtual springs and dampers through available actuation, this layer shapes how the hand interacts with its environment while guaranteeing inter-pretability and tunability. Integrating physical and virtual mechanical components , our co-design framework presents a new paradigm for anthropomor-phic robotic hands, enabling contact force estimation via motor feedback (pro-prioception) and greater versatility across a range of interactive behaviors.