Aimed at grasping motion characteristics, functional requirements and other problems of a developed underactuated dexterous hand, a compound hierarchical control system was proposed, which combined masterslave control and selfcontrol. The masterslave structure model combined DSP and FPGA was used in hardware system, and the modular design concept was used in software system. At the same time the grasping planning issue for underactuated dexterous hand based on genetic algorithm was discussed. At last, grasping characteristics testing experiments were conducted. Experimental results show that the control system with a friendly humanmachine interface (MMI) is fast in response, stable in performance, reliable and has low complexity, which makes the underactuated dexterous hand to effectively complete enveloped grasping for different objects. 