Experimental study of contact transition control incorporating joint acceleration feedback

Joint acceleration and velocity feedbacks are incorporated into a classical internal force control of a robot in contact with the environment. This is intended to achieve a robust contact transition and force tracking performance for varying unknown environments, without any need of adjusting the controller parameters. A unified control structure is proposed for free motion, contact transition, and constrained motion in view of the consumption of the initial kinetic energy generated by a nonzero impact velocity. The influence of the velocity and acceleration feedbacks, which are introduced especially for suppressing the transition oscillation, on the postcontact tracking performance is discussed. Extensive experiments are conducted on the third joint of a three-link direct-drive robot to verify the proposed scheme for environments of various stiffnesses, including elastic (sponge), less elastic (cardboard), and hard (steel plate) surfaces. Results are compared with those obtained by the transition control scheme without the acceleration feedback. The ability of the proposed control scheme in resisting the force disturbance during the postcontact period is also experimentally investigated.