Adaptive compliant motion control of manipulators: theory and experiments

This paper presents a new adaptive compliant motion control scheme for position-controlled manipulators. The strategy does not require knowledge of the manipulator dynamic model, the position controller parameters, or the environment, and is extremely simple computationally. The control scheme is shown to be globally asymptotically stable if the “inner-loop” position controller has a PD-plus-gravity compensation structure and globally stable even if gravity effects are not compensated. Computer simulation results are given for a Robotics Research Corporation (RRC) Model K-1207 redundant arm and demonstrate that accurate and robust force control is achievable with the proposed controller. Experimental results are presented for the RRC K-1207 robot and confirm that the control scheme provides a simple and effective means of obtaining high performance force control