Dynamic Adaptive Hybrid Impedance Control for Dynamic Contact Force Tracking in Uncertain Environments

The importance of robot contact operation control has been increasing recently due to a need for robots to interact more with the outside world. However, traditional robot compliance control cannot take both transient contact force overshoots and steady-state force tracking error problems into account. To address this problem, this paper aims to design a dynamic adaptive hybrid impedance (DAHI) controller to deal with dynamic contact force tracking in uncertain environments (e.g., polishing scenarios). Under the premise of analyzing the transient response and steady-state error in the hybrid impedance control (HI) and adaptive hybrid impedance (AHI) control, the DAHI control, which combines the advantages from HI and AHI control, is applied to improve the performance of AHI controller. The main goal of such a controller is to avoid force overshoots in the contact stage while maintaining force tracking error in the dynamic tracking stage. The proposed controller is capable of adapting its update rate parameter online in order to track a reference force in uncertain environments. Besides, it does not require any modeling or estimation of an environment's dynamics or the robot's dynamics. The simulation and experimental results both show the achieved control performance. The results have also been compared with the previous control methods.