PID position control of three-fingered hand for different grasping styles

This paper describes the design of reference position and the application of PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) position control for a three-fingered robot hand. The robot hand consists of six DOF robot fingers and one DOF palm that have been designed and fabricated in a previous work. The reference position for the control system is designed on Matlab Simulink based on two grasping styles as instructed by the user. This is the initial stage of preparing the three-fingered robot hand for grasping objects of different shapes. PID control is applied for the position control of motors programmed on Matlab Simulink and encoders are used to provide the feedback measurement of the motor positions in real time. The interface developed between PC Matlab Simulink programs, Arduino controller, motor drivers and sensors is also presented. The experimental result shows that the designed reference position has been successfully worked to provide the grasping styles and the PID control has sufficiently control the robot fingers for the desired task in real time.