An Architecture for Robot Force and Impact Control

An architecture for force and impact control is proposed. Its first objective is to control the robot in free motion until the contact with the environment is made. Next, it should make the transition to constrained as smooth as possible. Finally, it should switch to force control in order to assure the tracking of the force reference. An absolute priority is to protect the system against the dangerous peaks of force. Also, loss of contact should be avoided when possible. The performance is improved by taking care of the accumulation of elastic energy in the robot. Sampling period is changed depending on the state of the system. An experimental platform was developed in order to test the architecture