Real-Time Interactive Simulation of Finger Tendon Kinematics

The function of the human hand’s underlying tendon system is difficult to understand and visualize due to the complexity of the hand and tendon systems. An interactive hand model, driven by an underlying tendon system, could lead to better understanding and better bio-mimicry of the human hand. This paper presents the initial design of an interactive single finger Graphical User Interface (GUI) as the first steps toward an anatomically correct interactive GUI of the human hand. Four numerical methods for solving the forward kinematics of the finger are presented, a Jacobian Inverse, a Jacobian Transpose, the Levenberg–Marquardt, and the Nelder–Mead methods. Results showed that the Jacobian Transpose method converged the fastest to a solution at an average rate of 0.6ms. To allow the GUI to update in real-time the Jacobian Transpose method was selected to be used in the finger GUI as it grows toward a hand GUI.