Real-Time Force Regulation for Whole-Hand Dexterous Grasping

Abstract:Robust dexterous grasping requires maintaining physical stability despite contacts interactively evolving across the entire hand. A precomputed force distribution can easily fail under object motion, modeling errors, or external disturbances. In this paper, we present a framework for real-time force regulation over dynamically changing whole-hand contacts. Our method geometrically estimates contacts across all hand links using a tracked object model and proprioception, without requiring tactile sensing at those contacts. It repeatedly recomputes the desired contact-force distribution subject to friction constraints, actuator limits, and an actuation-consistency constraint motivated by classical whole-limb force analysis. We integrate this force-regulation controller with reactive reaching, enabling the hand to acquire a grasp, maintain it under disturbances, and regrasp after losing the object. Simulation experiments without gravity demonstrate improved grasp retention over fixed-allocation and fingertip-only execution under controlled perturbations, while real-world experiments on a 27-DoF arm-hand system demonstrate grasp maintenance and recovery under human-applied disturbances as contacts evolve across the whole hand. Project page: this https URL

9 pages, 10 figures. Project page: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2609.30082 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.30082v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.30082 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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