Repetitive grasping with anthropomorphic skin-covered hand enables robust haptic recognition

Skin is an essential component of artificial hands. It enables the use of object affordance for recognition and control, but due to its intrinsic locality and low density of current tactile sensors, stable and proper manual contacts with the objects are indispensable. Recently, design of hand structure have shown to be effective for adaptive grasping. However, such adaptive design are only introduced to the fingers in existing works of haptics and their role in recognition remains unclear. This paper introduces the design of the Bionic Hand; an anthropomorphic hand with adaptive design introduced to the whole hand and fully covered with sensitive skin. The experiment shows that anthropomorphic design of hand structure enables robust haptic recognition by convergence of object contact conditions into stable representative states through repetitive grasping. The structure of the human hand is found to solve the issue of narrowing down the sensor space for haptic object recognition by morphological computation.