GPI based velocity/force observer design for robot manipulators

In many applications involving a robot in contact with a surface it is important to control the interaction between the manipulator and its environment, usually by employing force sensors. However, sometimes it is desirable to remove them due to a variety of reasons, e.g. high costs, noisy measurements and a narrow bandwidth. To overcome these drawbacks, in this work it is proposed as a velocity/force observer based on the Generalized Proportional Integral (GPI) technique. Joint velocities and contact forces are estimated with only position measurements and then used in a force/position control scheme. Ultimate boundedness of the observation errors is formally proven and an arbitrarily small ultimate bound is then achieved. Simulation results are used to validate the proposed approach.