Explicit fuzzy force control of industrial manipulators with position servo drives

In this paper, a fuzzy force control algorithm is suggested for commercialized industrial robots equipped with the position servo drives, where control rules of the proposed fuzzy controller are changed according to the magnitude of environmental stiffness in such a way that good force response is maintained regardless of changes of environmental stiffness. Specifically, some fuzzy control rules are designed for several representative environmental stiffness values, and then a control action for a given arbitrary environmental stiffness value is decided by a fuzzy interpolation method. To show the validity of the proposed fuzzy controller, several experimental results are illustrated, where a 5-axis articulated robot manipulator equipped with the wrist force/torque sensor system and our prototype dual robot controller are employed