Traded and shared vision-force robot control for improved impact control

Many automated manufacturing processes require robots to interact with environment and to perform force/torque interaction such as mechanical assembly. Importantly, impact forces occur while robot and environment are in contact. Robot manipulators and control systems can experience instability or poor control performance after impacting with an environment. In this paper we combine vision and force feedback in shared/traded vision-force control to reduce the impact forces and to increase the performance of robot, by calculating the distance between robot´s end-effector and the environment and reducing the speed according to it. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of robot in two cases with and without vision feedback and to compare these results with simulation.