Explicit and implicit force control of an industrial manipulator — An experimental summary

This paper investigates simple explicit and implicit force control approaches for industrial robots. They are applied to impact and contact control. Furthermore, some of these algorithms are used for force controlled contour following, extended by additional features to improve the control behavior. A lot of approaches published in the past are not easy to implement in commercial robot controllers, because the access to robot joint torques is assumed or the exact dynamic model of the manipulator is used. For that reason we investigated only position based algorithms which can be implemented on a position controlled robot. All algorithms proposed in this paper are successfully verified by practical experiments.