Neural Network Control of Multifingered Robot Hands Using Visual Feedback

It is interesting to observe that humans are able to manipulate an object easily and skillfully without the exact knowledge of the object, contact points, or kinematics of our fingers. However, research so far on multifingered robot control has assumed that the kinematics and contact points of the fingers are known exactly. In many applications of multifingered robot hands, the kinematics and contact points of the fingers are uncertain and structures of the Jacobian matrices are unknown. In this paper, we propose an adaptive neural network (NN) Jacobian controller for multifingered robot hand with uncertainties in kinematics, Jacobian matrices, and dynamics. It is shown that using NNs, the uniform ultimate boundedness of the position error can be achieved in the presence of the uncertainties. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed controller.