In this paper some simple linear and nonlinear controllers for two different multifingered grippers-the Karlsruhe Dexterous Hand, and the Salisbury Hand developed at INRIA-are discussed. Mainly the nonlinear friction, the impact problem and other plant uncertainties require a special kind of control and tuning of the controller. An adaptive fuzzy controller is presented to overcome the time consuming process of fine-tuning of the membership functions. Finally, the used service- and object-oriented approach to ease and accelerate the control system design and software implementation process is outlined.