Interactive physical robot guidance through advanced 3D dynamic simulation-based robot control — A new eRobotics approach

Manual robot guidance is an intuitive and flexible approach to teach robots. It is particularly useful for manufacturers because of the low programming efforts. However, this method often requires compliance control that is generally not available in conventional position-controlled industrial robots. Addressing this issue from the perspective of simulation-driven engineering, we introduce in this contribution a novel approach for interactive physical robot guidance based upon simulated adaptable joint admittance control. The developed simulation-based controller is driven in real-time with real external joint torques estimated during interaction with a physical robot. Since the simulator closely replicates the dynamic behavior of the real robot, it enriches and enhances the robot guidance by providing unique and reliable information on the robot that is useful to the operator. The simulated compliant joint trajectories are fed back into the real robot controller to enable full-body guidance. By opening new and practical perspectives in assisted physical guidance of position-controlled robots, this approach hightlights the effectiveness of control-by-3D-simulation [1] as pursued by eRobotics [2] to address challenging issues in robotics and automation. Simulation and experimental case studies conducted on a physical 7 DoF KUKA LWR 4+ robot manipulator are provided to illustrate the performance of the approach.