Impedance control for hazardous waste handling applications

The authors focus on the development of a robot control system capable of meeting the requirements of hazardous waste handling applications, and present as a solution an adaptive scheme for controlling the mechanical impedance of kinematically redundant manipulators. The proposed controller is capable of accurate end-effector impedance control and effective redundancy utilization, does not require knowledge of the complex robot dynamic model or parameter values for the robot of the environment, and can be implemented without the calculation of the robot inverse kinematic transformation. Computer simulation results are given for a four degree of freedom redundant robot under adaptive impedance control. These results indicate that the proposed controller is capable of successfully performing tasks of importance in robotic waste handling applications