A Novel Grasping Control Method for Dexterous Prosthesis based on Eye-tracking

The state-of-art dexterous prosthetic hand with multi-degree-of-freedom urgently requires a control method to match its dexterity. The purpose of this paper is to develop a method on rapid grasp control of prosthetic hand based on eye-tracking and verify its effectiveness by experiments. Firstly, an interactive experiment platform was established. Based on the platform, the operator can select the necessary grasping pattern from a graphic interface through eye movement and trigger the selected pattern by gazing the target for a short time (~300ms). The selected grasp pattern will be fed back to the operator during the hand prosthesis performing reach-and-grasp tasks. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of this method, experiments were conducted by an able-bodied participant wearing the prosthesis to grasp some daily-used objects. Our result shows that, by adopting the eye tracking technology in the human visual channel, the grasp control of the prosthesis can be supervised and regulated in real-time and thus an effective interaction between the dexterous prosthesis and the operator can be achieved.