Introduction

The human hand is our preeminent and most versatile tool to explore and modify the external environment. It represents both the cognitive organ of the sense of touch and the most important end effector in object manipulation and grasping. Our brain can cope efficiently with the high degree of complexity of the hand, which arises from the huge amount of actuators and sensors. This allows us to perform a large number of daily life tasks, from the simple ones, such as determining the ripeness of a fruit or drive a car, to the more complex ones, as for example performing surgical procedures, playing an instrument or painting. Not surprisingly, an intensive research effort has been devoted to (i) understand the neuroanatomical and physiological mechanisms underpinning the sensorimotor control of human hands and (ii) to attempt to reproduce such mechanisms in artificial robotic systems