Motion control of mobile manipulator for human interaction

This paper aims at the improvement in a future life using a mobile manipulator. For example, power assistance of old people and cooperative operation with a human. For coexistence of robot and human being, it is required that a person can work in cooperation with robot safety. To make this environment, this paper introduces the impedance control. When the force command by a human is added, the robot follows it. When the force command is not added, robot follows the position command. By this motion, robot can perform desired impedance motion and soft operation. This is one of the remarkable points in the proposed strategy. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by experimental results.