AN APPROACH FOR BIO-MIMETIC JOINT MOTION PLANNING OF HUMANOID FINGERS Byoung-Ho Kim†, ◦ and Shigeyuki Hosoe◦

Stably planning a joint motion of humanoid fingers is very important for precise hand operations. In this paper, an ef-fective joint motion planning method for humanoid fingers is proposed. Our approach consists of two folds. One is to determine an adequate initial configuration of a finger. The other one is to plan real-time joint configurations of the fin-ger during a manipulation process. For the second purpose especially, an empirical model that describes an interpha-langeal coordination in a human finger is suggested and in-corporated into the proposed joint motion planning method. Various simulation results show us practical merits of our approach that guides a finger to an effective trajectory for precise manipulating tasks. The effect of two different ap-proaches is contrasted. As a result, it is illustrated that our approach enables a finger to get a more natural movement and thus, it is useful for humanoid fingers as well as pros-thetic fingers. KEY WORDS humanoid fingers, bio-mimetic joint motion planning, in-terphalangeal coordination.