Multiple robot manipulators' cooperative compliant manipulation on dynamical environments

This paper discusses compliant manipulation of multiple robot manipulator's cooperative in a dynamical environment. Cooperative compliant manipulation requires the simultaneous control of both the object's position and the interaction forces between the robots and the object. It is shown that position-controlled manipulators can not perform this kind of task successfully. It is proved that, in order to avoid excessive pressing, the frequency bandwidth of the overall control systems including the manipulators and the object should be adjusted according to the object dynamics. A unified model-matching control approach is developed in which each autonomous robot uses its own position and interaction force information to adjust the system's frequency bandwidth and to maintain the internal force in a desired performance. The reference models of the object's position and the internal force are selected with respect to the object's dynamics, and the force feedback controllers are designed accordingly to realize the reference models. Simulation studies show the effectiveness of this control approach.