Operational space robot control for motion performance and safe interaction under Unintentional Contacts

A control law achieving motion performance of quality and compliant reaction to unintended contacts for robot manipulators is proposed in this work. It achieves prescribed performance evolution of the position error under disturbance forces up to a tunable level of magnitude. Beyond this level, it deviates from the desired trajectory complying to what is now interpreted as unintentional contact force, thus achieving enhanced safety by decreasing interaction forces. The controller is a passivity model based controller utilizing an artificial potential that induces vanishing vector fields. Simulation results with a three degrees of freedom (DOF) robot under the control of the proposed scheme, verify theoretical findings and illustrate motion performance and compliance under an external force of short duration in comparison with a switched impedance scheme.