Deflection-Domain Passivity Control of Variable Stiffnesses Based on Potential Energy Reference

With emerging capabilities, robots will advance gradually into human environments in the near future. Thereby, safety and robustness is currently tackled through intrinsically soft robotics or variable impedances, mainly stiffnesses. In tele-operation, for instance, the control stiffness can be adapted to a measured arm impedance of the operator to stiffen the robot only when required for a manipulation task. Thus, humans or moving objects in the robot’s environment are protected from hard collisions. Independent from its realization through hardware or software, the stability of the variation needs to be ensured through control strategies since energy is potentially introduced into the robotic system. This work presents a novel gradient-based passivity control concept for variable stiffnesses. In contrast to state-of-the-art methods, the approach is based on a potential energy storage reference and prevents phases of zero stiffness through deflection-domain control. I.e., according to the energy storage, the stiffness variation over the spring deflection is controlled to ensure passivity. Experiments confirm the functionality of the approach and its robustness against delayed communication and active environments.