A hierarchical multi-fingered hand control structure with rolling contact compensation

We deal with the control of a multifingered robot hand in a dexterous manipulation task. For that purpose, we have previously proposed an efficient modular and hierarchical control scheme. This solution is different from other proposed methods since the position and force controllers are decentralized, that is, implemented at the local level of each finger. A new module is introduced here to compensate for the error caused by the deviation of the contact locations due to the rolling contacts between the fingertips and the handled object. On the basis of the contact kinematics, the "rolling contact" module updates the contact locations to modify the position and force references sent to each local finger controller in order to account for the motion of the contact points.