A systematic design procedure of force controllers for industrial robots

In this paper, the problem of designing a force controller for industrial robots with a positional interface is addressed. A systematic design procedure to compute structures and parameters of the controller is devised, to provide a useful tool for rapid and robust setup of force control at the industrial level. The proposed method for synthesis of the force controller simply requires technology parameters provided by the robot manufacturer and desired performance expressed in non-technical terms by the user. The automated design algorithm is described in detail and its effectiveness was proved by experiments on two different industrial robots. On the first robotic setup, the performance of the designed controllers was evaluated by analyzing the experimental results of responses to canonical reference signals; on the second setup, the controller reliability and applicability at the industrial level were demonstrated through the results of a mechanical parts mating task.

[1]  Joseph Duffy,et al.  Hybrid Twist and Wrench Control for a Robotic Manipulator , 1988 .

[2]  Bruno Siciliano,et al.  Robot Force Control , 2000 .

[3]  Gene F. Franklin,et al.  Digital control of dynamic systems , 1980 .

[4]  Wen-Hong Zhu,et al.  Force control: A bird's eye view , 1998 .

[5]  Luigi Villani,et al.  Experiments of impedance control on an industrial robot manipulator with joint friction , 1996, Proceeding of the 1996 IEEE International Conference on Control Applications IEEE International Conference on Control Applications held together with IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Contro.

[6]  Hendrik Van Brussel,et al.  Compliant Robot Motion II. A Control Approach Based on External Control Loops , 1988, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[7]  Daniel E. Whitney,et al.  Quasi-Static Assembly of Compliantly Supported Rigid Parts , 1982 .

[8]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  A unified approach for motion and force control of robot manipulators: The operational space formulation , 1987, IEEE J. Robotics Autom..

[9]  N. H. McClamroch,et al.  Feedback stabilization and tracking of constrained robots , 1988 .

[10]  John J. Craig,et al.  Hybrid position/force control of manipulators , 1981 .

[11]  Pradeep K. Khosla,et al.  A Theoretical and Experimental Investigation of Impact Control for Manipulators , 1993, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[12]  Lorenzo Sciavicco,et al.  The parallel approach to force/position control of robotic manipulators , 1993, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[13]  Kamal Youcef-Toumi,et al.  Impact and Force Control: Modeling and Experiments , 1994 .

[14]  Ciro Natale,et al.  An automatic procedure for force controller design , 1999, 1999 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (Cat. No.99TH8399).

[15]  D. E. Whitney,et al.  Historical Perspective and State of the Art in Robot Force Control , 1987 .

[16]  Gerd Hirzinger,et al.  Flexible robot-assembly using a multi-sensory approach , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[17]  G. Hirzinger,et al.  Sensorimotor Skill Transfer of Compliant Motion , 2000 .