Reference adaptive impedance control and its application to obstacle avoidance trajectory planning

A new paradigm of event-based robotic control, called reference adaptive impedance control, is presented for partially constrained robots under uncertain or unknown environmental constraints. The reference adaptive impedance control determines the desired next state adaptively in such a way as to follow the optimal path from the current state, where the optimal path is generated with the environmental constraints updated through time. The embedded impedance control provides a mechanism for collecting more complete information on the environment. An application to obstacle avoidance trajectory planning is given with computer simulations.