Powered prostheses with low degree of freedom (DoF) have been developed for people with disabilities to assist daily tasks. These prostheses neglect the user's compensatory movements caused by the low degree of freedom. We assume that the movements can be reduced by well-designed controller of the devices. This paper explores an optimal control gain of the powered prosthesis to prevent the user from compensatory movements through experiments. In the experiments, we developed 1-DoF hand prosthesis with a position-controlled servo, which includes the constant gain as a feed-forward term. The compensatory movements are regarded as a joint torque at a shoulder (abduction/adduction). 4 intact subjects performed a pick-and-place task, using the prosthesis with several control gains. The empirical results show that there was the optimal gain for each subject, which reduces their compensatory movement.
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