Experiments of Force Control Algorithms for Compliant Robot Motion

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the performance of various force control algorithms in improving and adjusting the compliance of industrial robots in contact with their environment. Some of fundamental force control algorithms such as sensorless control, impedance control and hybrid position/force control are theoretically analyzed and simulated for various situations of an environment, and then a series of experiments using them were performed. In this paper, a control scheme to use position control in implementing the impedance control was investigated in order to nullify the effect of joint friction. The new reference trajectory is generated using contact force feedback and original desired trajectory. And an inner position control loop is designed to provide accurate position tracking for the new reference trajectory and good disturbance rejection. Experiments to insert a peg in a hole (so-called the peg-in-a-hole task) were performed with HILS (hardware-in-theloop simulation) system based on the results of the analyses and simulations on the characteristics of each control algorithm. The experiments showed that various force control methods improved the performance of robots in close contact with the environment by adjusting their compliance with respect to an arbitrary set of coordinates.