TacDexGrasp: Compliant and Robust Dexterous Grasping with Tactile Feedback

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tactile feedback-based controller for multi-fingered robotic grasping that ensures stability and compliance by actively managing contact forces, effectively preventing slip without explicit slip detection or torque modeling.

Contribution

It presents a novel SOCP-based control method leveraging tactile feedback to maintain stable, compliant grasps on diverse objects, addressing force distribution and slip prevention challenges.

Findings

Successfully grasped 12 diverse objects with high stability.

Maintained grasp stability by controlling the force ratio at contacts.

Demonstrated robustness and compliance in real-world experiments.

Abstract

Multi-fingered hands offer great potential for compliant and robust grasping of unknown objects, yet their high-dimensional force control presents a significant challenge. This work addresses two key problems: (1) distributing forces across multiple contacts to counteract an object's weight, and (2) preventing rotational slip caused by gravitational torque when a grasp is distant from the object's center of mass. We address these challenges via tactile feedback and a Second-Order Cone Programming (SOCP)-based controller, without explicit torque modeling or slip detection. Our key insights are (1) rotational slip inevitably induces translational slip at some contact points for a multi-fingered grasp, and (2) the ratio of tangential to normal force at each contact is an effective early stability indicator. By actively constraining this ratio for each finger below the estimated friction coefficient, our controller maintains grasp stability against both translational and rotational slip. Real-world experiments on 12 diverse objects demonstrate the robustness and compliance of our approach.