My diploma thesis from ECE NTUA (2013) - finally rescued from a dusty hard drive after 13 years! 🎓
A MATLAB/Simulink implementation of object-level impedance control for a simulated 4-finger (16-DoF) robotic hand, using the ODE physics engine.
This project implements and validates a well-known object-level impedance control framework, primarily based on:
T. Wimböck, C. Ott, G. Hirzinger
"Passivity-based Object-Level Impedance Control for a Multifingered Hand"
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2006, pp. 4621-4627
DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2006.282170
The main value of this repo is therefore: a complete, working simulation framework + full derivations + parameter justification + extensions, rather than proposing a brand-new control concept.
- Full mathematical analysis of the control framework (the thesis is intentionally math-heavy)
- Complete forward kinematics for the 4-finger hand, including DH parameter identification
- Symbolic dynamics derivation for the fingers (Euler–Lagrange) using Mathematica/Robotica
- Symbolic gravity compensation term computed in Mathematica
- Parameter justification: why the stiffness choices are physically/control-wise reasonable (not just “picked values”)
- Enhanced damping control law, integrated from additional literature and made to work in this setting
- End-to-end MATLAB/Simulink + ODE simulation implementation (including all the plumbing needed to reproduce results)
- Reproduction + validation of the published behavior, plus additional evaluation plots
- Extension of the contact force model
| Translation + Rotation | Force Response |
|---|---|
 |
 |
- 📄 Thesis PDF (Greek) - The full diploma thesis (original, in Greek)
- 📄 Thesis PDF (English, auto-translated) - Automatic/machine translation of the thesis (not analytically checked, but it looks good tbh)
- 📝 LaTeX source - If you want to compile it yourself
- 🔧 MATLAB/Simulink code - The simulation implementation
- 🧮 Mathematica notebooks - Symbolic dynamics derivation using Robotica (inertia matrix, gravity terms, Jacobians)
- 🎬 Videos - Simulation recordings
The idea (from Wimböck et al.): instead of controlling each finger joint separately, control the object's position/orientation directly through impedance control. The controller makes the grasped object behave like a mass-spring-damper system in Cartesian space, with internal forces maintaining grasp stability.
cd doc/dipl.-thesis/latex
./compile.shRequires XeLaTeX + GFS Didot Greek fonts. See thesis README for details.
Supervisor: Prof. Konstantinos Tzafestas, Signals Control & Robotics, ECE NTUA