Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation of Vehicle-Manipulator Systems for Physical Interaction Tasks

Hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) allows a more realistic evaluation of control approaches than what is possible with pure software simulations, but without the actual complexity of the complete system. This is important for some complex systems such as orbital robots, where testing of the system is typically not possible after its launch, and an on-ground replica is used to validate the performance of such a system. In this article, an impedance-matching approach is presented to match the end-effector dynamics of a fixed-base robot manipulator with that of a target vehicle-manipulator system (VMS), while taking into account the redundant nullspace dynamics in a connected real-time simulation framework. This approach ensures that the forces and torques exerted by the system on the environment matches with that of the simulated system. The contact wrenches used in our approach are not obtained from numerical simulations, but rather from real physical interaction, which is one of the main advantages of our approach. The effectiveness of our method is validated by demonstrating various physical interaction tasks with the environment, using a suspended aerial manipulator as the target system.