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The education of young mechatronics engineers is crucial for the development of powerful and sophisticated products in a modern marketplace where the best technology is having the greatest economic impact. Therefore, this paper aims to design and introduce a robotic hand to facilitate and accelerate the teaching/learning process when designing mechatronics systems in different undergraduate lecture‐based courses and, consequently, gain more practical experience under a "hands‐on" experience. The results from an evaluation carried out at a Mexican university present the design and implementation of a movement control system for recognition of hand gestures. Quantitative and qualitative data are also provided to demonstrate that students experienced high‐positive perceptions during the evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the use of a commercial EMG armband for the motion control of a prototype hand prosthesis is proposed. The mechanical design is based on an open source six degree-of-freedom hand. Some modifications from the original design are proposed, mainly in the actuation and power transmission devices to reduce the prototype's costs and to provide a major mobility to the thumb to adapt the motion to the shape of the grasped object. Unlike some similar prototypes previously reported and considering that the proposed application requires portability, the use of a PC for the acquisition and processing of the EMG data has been replaced by a portable hardware system based on the master/slave architecture. The master device is a Raspberry Pi-based subsystem interfaced with the EMG armlet for gathering and classifying information from the user's muscular activity. The slave device is an ATmega328 microcontroller-based subsystem that defines the movements of the robotic hand from the information collected and processed by the master device. Experimental results are presented to evaluate the performance of the EMG-controlled hand prosthesis carrying out different types of grasping tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]