Testing experimentally the robustness against friction of a force control algorithm

Among the many challenges to deal with when a robot is interacting with its environment, friction at the contact surface and/or at the joints is one of the most important to be considered. Recently a force control algorithm for robot manipulators was proposed. This scheme was designed to work under the assumption that only viscous friction is present. Since in general this may be restrictive, in this work we test experimentally the robustness of this control scheme against more rigorous conditions of friction.