Model-free impedance control for safe human-robot interaction

In this paper, model-free impedance control is designed for the safe human-robot interaction. A passive impedance model is imposed on the robot and a control method is proposed to guarantee the robot dynamics governed by the target model. The proposed method does not require any model information except for upper bounds of system matrix. It is thus easy to apply to practical implementation. The rigorous analysis of the control performance and robustness is presented. The validity of the proposed method is verified on the six degrees of-freedom (DOF) PUMA 560 robot arm through simulation.