A GAIN SCHEDULING APPROACH FOR HYBRID FORCE/VELOCITY CONTROLLED ROBOT CONTOUR TRACKING

Abstract This paper deals with the implementation of a hybrid force/velocity controller for the contour tracking of an object of an unknown shape performed by an industrial robot manipulator. In particular we propose the use of a gain scheduling approach in order to cope with the configuration dependent dynamics of the manipulator in constrained motion and therefore in order to allow to obtain satisfactory performances in a very large portion of the robot workspace. Experimental results, obtained with a two degrees-of-freedom SCARA industrial robot manipulator show the effectiveness of the approach.