Simulation Studies in Manipulator Impedance Control

This paper describes an adaptive scheme for controlling the end-effector impedance of robot manipulators. The proposed control system consists of three subsystems: a simple "filter" which characterizes the desired dynamic relationship between the end-effector position error and the end-effector/environment contact force, an adaptive controller which produces the Cartesian-space control input required to provide this desired dynamic relationship, and an algorithm for mapping the Cartesian-space control input to a physically realizable joint-space control torque. The controller does not require knowledge of either the structure or the parameter values of the robot dynamics, and is implemented without calculation of the robot inverse kinematic transformation. As a result, the scheme represents a very general and computationally efficient approach to controlling the impedance of both nonredundant and redundant manipulators. Computer simulation results are given for a planar four degree-of-freedom redundant robot under adaptive impedance control. These results demonstrate that accurate end-effector impedance control and effective redundancy utilization can be achieved simultaneously by using the proposed controller.