A decentralized object impedance controller for object/robot-team systems: theory and experiments

This paper derives a decentralized object impedance controller (DOIC) especially suited for use by a team of robots and/or multiple manipulators. In contrast to the original object impedance controller (OIC), a separate DOIC operates on each robot to provide local computation of the manipulator force commands, thus removing the need for expensive high-bandwidth communication of force signals between the robots. The key advance of the DOIC that provides this benefit is a decentralized algorithm for estimating the external force on the object. This paper derives the DOIC, provides stability analysis, and verifies the theory with definitive physical experiments