Exact decoupling of the force-position control using the operational space formulation

The authors present an algorithm for hybrid force-position control of a robot manipulator using the operational space formulation approach. The proposed scheme modifies and integrates a previous algorithm due to O. Khatib (1987) and to Khatib and J. Burdick (1986), to achieve an exact decoupling of the force and position control along the task subspaces. The theoretical results presented demonstrate the viability of this approach, which was confirmed by simulation results. These provided evidence that the decoupling between force and position was exact, with no noticeable increase in the required computational burden