Hands for autonomous and dexterous grasping
The human hand is an incredibly complex system with a huge spectrum of functionality. Hands are essential not only to interact with different objects daily, but also necessary for social interactions, such as communication and arts. The loss of a hand is a terrific traumatic experience regardless to any gender or ethnicity, usually followed by significant psychological and rehabilitation challenges. The interaction between engineering and science has, for a long time, made efforts to restore the functionality of a lost limb. Although enormous progress has been reached, there are still serious drawbacks in terms of functionality and reliability due to the conventional myoelectric human-machine interface (e.g.,  electromyography sensors placed on the skin of the residual limb) and to prostheses simply not up to the task. Unfortunately, this is reflected in a too high rejection rate of prosthetic devices. The current situation can change if efforts are spent on the development of more intelligent prosthetic hardware. This project has the mission to develop methods for creating prosthetic hands which are semi (or potentially even completely) autonomous from the conventional myoelectric human-machine interface. This will be achieved by observing in unprecedented detail the human grasping behaviours and exploiting modern sensor technology, efficient data processing units, and artificial intelligence algorithms. Semi-autonomous prosthetic hands can be a game changer, ultimately converting the conventional view of a prosthetic hand from a tool to a more complex device that interacts in an intelligent fashion with the user and any object.