Flexible FPGA-based controller architecture for five-fingered dexterous robot hand with effective impedance control

Several practical issues associated with achieving effective impedance performance in the finger joint space and stable grasping on a five-fingered dexterous hand are investigated in this work. A Multiprocessor structure based on field programming gate array (FPGA) is proposed to realize the high-level hand impedance controller. The key feature of the hardware system is a dual-processor architecture based controller, one of which is used for data communication control and the other for joint and object level control. High speed (200μs cycle time) multipoint low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) serial data bus communication between each finger and the controller, Ethernet communication between monitor PC and controller, are all implemented on a single FPGA chip. Experimental results and simulation with a five-fingered dexterous robot hand demonstrate that the controller architecture is able to achieve the desired robot hand impedance control performance and effective stable grasping.