A hand/arm controller that simultaneously regulates internal grasp forces and the impedance of contacts with the environment

This paper presents a control framework for arm/hand systems aimed at controlling internal forces exchanged between the fingers and the grasped object, and enforcing a compliant behavior in presence of environmental interactions. A dynamic planner computes the motion references for the fingers by using the feedback of the contact forces, while an impedance control, in which dynamic effects exerted by the hand on the wrist are explicitly taken into account, is designed for the arm. The approach is experimentally validated on a 7-DOFs Barrett WAM with a Barrett Hand280.