Implementation of Admittance Control on a Construction Robot Using Load Cells

Physical human-robot interactions (pHRI) must be safe and should feel natural to the human operator. To this end impedance or admittance control is often employed to relate the force applied by the human to the dynamic behavior of the robot. The robot in this work uses a load cell to sense the externally applied force. This paper presents a practical modelling procedure and implementation of admittance control that specifically deal with the undesired non-linearities caused by the use of a load cell. Experiments are performed on a 1-DoF (Degree of Freedom) testbed to validate the work done and the results show that the performance is satisfactory.