Extensive Human Training for Robot Skill Synthesis: Validation on a Robotic Hand

We propose a framework for skill synthesis for robots that exploits the human capacity to learn novel control tasks. The conceptual idea is to incorporate the target robotic platform into the experimenter's body schema so that it can be controlled effortlessly as if the robot were a part of the body. Once this stage is achieved, the dexterity on a task exhibited with the new external limb -the robot- can be used for designing controllers for the task under consideration. This article exemplifies the proposed framework by showing the derivation of an effective open-loop controller that can manipulate two balls with the fingers of a 16-DOF robotic hand.