DLR's multisensory articulated hand. II. The parallel torque/position control system

Gives a brief description of feedback control systems engaged in DLR's recently developed multisensory 4-finger robot hand. The work is concentrated on constructing the dynamic model and the control strategy for one joint of the fingers. One goal is to make the hand follow a dataglove for fine manipulation tasks. Our proposed strategy for this task is parallel torque/position control; sliding mode control is realized for the robust trajectory tracking in free space; while impedance control is provided for compliance control in the constrained environment; and an easily-designed parallel observer is used for the switch between these two control modes during the transition from or to contact motion. Some experimental results show the effectiveness of proposed strategy for the pure position control, torque control, and the transition control.