Biomimetic sliding mode control of a prosthetic hand

Two methods of control for a prosthetic hand are presented. A fairly typical force feedback controller is compared to a novel biomimetic application of sliding mode control. The two controllers are evaluated analytically and subjectively by six human test subjects. The analytical experiments show that the human operators, on average, were more capable of effectively using the prosthetic hand with the biomimetic slding mode controller. The averaged results from the subjective evaluations indicated that the biomimetic sliding mode controller was more similar to operation of the human hand than the force controller.