Adaptive impedance modification of a master-slave manipulator

Master-slave teleoperators have to cope with tasks so different such as unconstrained motion and hard contact tasks. If the controller is tuned on one of them, the other will not perform well and may, eventually, lead to an unstable system. In this paper, an adaptive modification of the desired robot behaviour in the orthogonal direction to the contact task is proposed. This strategy makes the system stable in hard contact tasks while easy to control in unconstrained motion. Experimental results obtained with a 2-degree-of-freedom manipulator prove the effectiveness of the method