Simple Controllers for Multifingered Grippers

Controlling multifingered robot hands makes high demands on the control algorithms and the speed of the control computer. Mainly the nonlinear friction, the elasticity of tendon driven joints, the impact problem and other plant uncertainties require a special kind of control and tuning of the controller. In this paper some simple linear and nonlinear controllers for two different multifingered grippers - the Karlsruhe Dexterous Hand and the Salisbury Hand of the INRIA (see Figure 1) - are presented and the results and advantages of the controllers are shown. Also, a new adaptive fuzzy controller is presented to overcome the time consuming process of fine-tuning of the membership functions. Finally, a service- and object-oriented approach to ease and accelerate the control system design and software implementation process is presented. 1 Introduction The basic level of position and force control has to be well understood in order to build up a global control system architecture with hi..