Adaptive compliance control for collision-tolerant robot arm with viscoelastic trunk

Abstract

In the present work, a collision-tolerant control method was proposed to achieve a stable task performance of the robot arm in an acceptable collision-safe margin. A robot arm covered with the soft capacitive sensing skin mounted on a passive mechanical viscoelastic trunk has been proposed to suppress the unexpected collisions which may happen from anywhere in the social context. The viscoelastic trunk contributed to the passive deformation in response to the collision forces and the joint configurations of the robot arm were directly calculated in accordance to the trunk deformation. An adaptive control scheme has been introduced to achieve a good end-effector trajectory performance upon collisions. Simulation results and actual assessment on a prototype model confirmed the effectiveness of proposed methods. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.