Passivity-based control of robots: Historical perspective and contemporary issues

Passivity is one of the most physically appealing concepts in systems and control theory. The stored internal energy in a passive system is bounded from above by the externally supplied energy. It is well known that this energy dissipation property has important implications for closed-loop stability. Additionally, the passivity property is preserved with respect to feedback and parallel interconnections of passive systems. This composability property of passive systems is crucial in designing and analyzing highly networked systems. Due to these desirable features, the passivity paradigm has been widely utilized to achieve outstanding success in robot control, which is the main focus of the session. The tutorial session starts with a historical perspective on passivity-based robot control and its broad applicability to several important problems in robotics. Despite the long history, passivity-based robot control is being actively utilized in addressing emerging problems in robot control. Hence, the remainder of the session presents application of passivity-based robot control to address important research issues in bilateral teleoperation, visual feedback estimation and robot control, cooperative robot control, and mixed human-robot teams.