Cartesian Impedance Control on Five-Finger Dexterous Robot Hand DLR-HIT II with Flexible Joint

This paper presents an impedance controller for five-finger dexterous robot hand DLR-HIT II, which is derived in Cartesian space. By considering flexibility in finger joints and strong mechanical couplings in differential gear-box, modeling and control of the robot hand are described in this paper. The model-based friction estimation and velocity observer are carried out with an extended Kalman filter, which is implemented with parameters estimated by Least Squares Method. The designed estimator demonstrates good prediction performance, as shown in the experimental results. Stability analysis of the proposed impedance controller is carried out and described in this paper. Impedance control experiments are conducted with the five-finger dexterous robot hand DLR-HIT II in Cartesian coordinates system to help study the effectiveness of the proposed controller with friction compensation and hardware architecture.