An experimental evaluation and comparison of explicit force control strategies for robotic manipulators

The authors present results of experimental tests of a broad spectrum of basic force control strategies: proportional with feedforward, integral, filtered feedback proportional-derivative, and second-order low-pass filtering. The experiments were performed on the CMU Direct Drive Arm II so that the results would reflect the nature of the controller and not the unmodeled aspects of the system which comprises the plant. The commonality amongst the experiments was such that it was possible to compare and contrast the strategies objectively and to draw conclusions about the efficacy of each. The results support previous analysis and show the superiority of integral force control for force trajectory tracking