Force/Position Regulation for a Robotic Finger in Compliant Contact with an Unknown Surface

In this paper we are concerned with the problem of force and position regulation of a soft robotic finger in contact with a flat unknown surface. A type of parallel control scheme with gravity compensation is applied. Using nonlinear stability theory it is shown that the proposed controller achieves exact force regulation. It is further shown that position errors may stay close to zero and in some cases can even vanish even in the presence of uncertainties. Simulation results support theoretical findings