When the arm prosthesis worn by an amputated Human being is not adequately configured with respect to the end-effector task, body compensations are often observed. Namely, to compensate for a wrong joint positioning on the robotic distal side, a subject trying to reach a desired position/orientation of his/her hand mobilizes his/her proximal joints, thus exploiting the redundancy of the human+robot kinematic chain.In this paper, we explore the possibility of exploiting this well-known behavior to reverse the causality: if we observe the posture of an amputated subject wearing a prosthesis during a hand positioning task, to what extent can we infer the positioning error of the prosthesis?To answer this question, we make the assumption that the adequate, or natural posture for a given task is one that optimizes a postural score. The proposed approach then consists in i) measuring the joint posture of the subject fitted with the prosthesis; ii) search for an alternative posture that optimizes a postural score within the null space of the human+robot kinematic chain and iii) compute the position error for the robot joints between the initial and the optimized posture.An experimental evaluation is provided with non amputated subjects who emulate erratic positioning of their distal joints during hand positioning tasks. Results show that joint errors are estimated with a precision that seems compatible with the implementation of a real time control algorithm.

Beyond the ultimate goal of prosthetics, repairing all the capabilities of amputees, the development line of upper-limb prostheses control mainly relies on three aspects: the robustness, the intuitiveness and the reduction of mental fatigue. Many complex structures and algorithms are proposed but no one question a common open-loop nature, where the user is the one in charge of correcting errors. Yet, closing the control loop at the prosthetic level may help to improve the three main lines of research cited above. One major issue to build a closed-loop control is the definition of a reliable error signal; this paper proposes to use body compensations, naturally exhibited by prostheses users when the motion of their device is inaccurate, as such. The described control scheme measures these compensatory movements and makes the prosthesis move in order to bring back the user into an ergonomic posture. The function of the prosthesis is no longer to perform a given motion but rather to correct the posture of its user while s/he focus on performing an endpoint task. This concept was validated and compared to a standard open-loop scheme, for the control of a prosthetic wrist, with five healthy subjects completing a dedicated task with a customized transradial prosthesis. Results show that the presented closed-loop control allows for more intuitiveness and less mental burden without enhancing body compensation.