Analysis and experimental validation of force bandwidth for force control

Controlling robots in contact with the environment is an important problem in industry applications. In the conventional force control, much research has paid attention to develop novel force control systems and implemented force sensors to detect external force. This paper shows that narrow bandwidth of force sensor has a big influence on the force control system. Generally, to solve the instability in force control, the velocity feedback gain is enlarged. The system becomes unstable with small velocity feedback gain, and robot's response becomes slow with large one. Inasmuch as there is a tradeoff between the stability and the response, it is considered that force control by robots is difficult. This paper proposes a force control system with disturbance observer. It is possible to obtain the force information with wide bandwidth by using the disturbance observer. This paper shows that bandwidth of force sensing is very important for contact motion control. By using the wide bandwidth of force sensing, both stability and response are improved. Furthermore, force control is attainable by the construction of the easiest force control architecture. Therefore, the ideal zero-stiffness-force control is attained. The numerical and experimental results show viability of the proposed method.