Haosen Yang, Guowu Wei
Analyzed the mechanical intelligence provided by the anatomical structures (bones, ligaments, tendons) of the human hand and developed a biomimetic robot hand that imitates them, demonstrating that complex contact tasks can be performed with low-dimensional control.
Conventional dexterous robotic hands rely on many degrees of freedom and complex active control algorithms. However, human hand dexterity is partly encoded not only in active control but also in the physical architecture of bones, ligaments, and tendons themselves. There is a need to identify this 'structural intelligence' and effectively transplant it into robots.
Two forms of structural intelligence were derived from human hand anatomy: (1) 'structural prior generation', where wrist-to-finger tenodesis, FDS/FDP routing, and the dorsal extensor hood transform low-dimensional posture inputs into default grasp configurations; and (2) 'muscle-mediated modulation', where extrinsic muscles, lumbricals, and interossei regulate MCP posture, distal stability, fingertip force paths, and contact states around that default state. Based on this framework, the MCR-Bionic Hand was built as a 1:1 musculoskeletal biomimetic hand, integrating a two-row eight-bone wrist, cross-wrist tendons, anatomical flexor routing, volar plate and collateral ligament constraints, the dorsal extensor hood, and intrinsic muscle pathways within one body.
Functional demonstrations and geometric mechanical models showed that wrist posture induces multi-joint pre-shaping, the extensor hood maps PIP posture to a coupled DIP response, and intrinsic plus pathways modulate distal stability and fingertip action direction after grasp formation. Contact-rich tasks, including coin rotation, pen transfer, dorsal coin flipping, and cube manipulation, showed that MCR-Bionic links low-dimensional state generation with fine post-contact modulation. These results suggest that anatomical biomimetics is valuable not for visual similarity, but for identifying human hand structures that perform part of control.