The Joint-Space Reconstruction of Human Fingers by Using a Highly Under-Actuated Exoskeleton

Hand motion tracking is essential in many fields, e.g., immersive virtual reality, teleoperation of robotic hand, and hand rehabilitation of stroke patient, as human hand plays a crucial role in our daily life. The highly under-actuated hand exoskeleton, which can track the 6-DoF motions of each fingertip via a highly under-actuated kinematic chain, exhibits many benefits in wearability and portability over other solutions. However, due to the non-anthropomorphic linkage, this hand exoskeleton also encounters difficulties in measuring human-finger’s joint angles. While the joint-space is important in many scenarios, such as teleoperating a robotic hand with anthropomorphic kinematics but with different size to human. Here we proposed a new method to reconstruct the human finger joints by using a highly under-actuated hand exoskeleton. Our key contribution is the arc-fitting algorithm, which is able to calibrate the misalignment between the exoskeleton’s and the human-finger’s base frames and estimate the length of human’s phalanxes, by using the fingertip’s circular motions. With know- ing the aforementioned informations, the joint angles can be reconstructed in high precision based on the inverse kinematics models of human fingers. Furthermore, our proposed method is compared with a baseline method, in which the joint angles obtained by a motion capture system are served as ground- truth. The results demonstrate that our proposed method exhibits excellent performance in reconstructing finger’s joint configurations.