Gain scheduled control for robot manipulator's contact tasks on flexible environments

This paper studies on a robot manipulator's contact task on its flexible environments. Because of its flexibility, the environment dynamics will influence the robot's control system, and since it is a distributed parameter system, the object dynamics seen from the robot's end-effector will change when the robot moves on its different locations. In this paper the object's distributed parameter dynamics is approximated into a linear parameter-varying system (LPV). The robot's control space is decomposed into a position control sub-space and a force control sub-space. Optimal state feedback is designed for the position control loop, and gain scheduled control is applied for the force control loop. The effectiveness of this approach is shown by computer simulations