Is Force Monitoring in Cooperating Industrial Robots Necessary?

Force monitoring and control for cooperating robots has been a favorite issue for control researchers in the latter decade. Despite the research effort, the widespread industrial application thereof is still considered non-existent given its potential. In this essay, the issue of force monitoring in Cooperating Industrial Robots (CIR) and the consequences thereof are scrutinized by demonstrating a multitude of programming applications built on force control. Based on motion and force requirements of a given process, the ability to improve the system by integrating the force signals into the main control loop is discussed in the context of a universal work-piece based approach. The proposed approach is largely built upon (a) a comprehensive signal switching technique and (b) a multi-layered control architecture. To validate the technical and practical feasibility of the proposed method, several experiments are executed on an industrial test-rig.