Experimental study on a robust interaction control with unknown environments

Abstract

The non-linear bang-bang impact control (NBBIC) had been proposed two decades ago as a promising robot interaction control to deal with free-space motion, impact, and the constrained-space motion without changing controller structure and gains. It does not need robot and environment dynamics except for an estimate of inertia matrix, and utilize the most recent control input and acceleration to compensate for the robot and environment dynamics and disturbances. Recently, the stability for multi-degree-of-freedom robots was completely proved. Hence, the experimental verification of its performance and utility remains. Thus, this study has verified the performance of NBBIC in comparison with other controllers using an industrial robot and shown that the performance of NBBIC was comparable to or better than that of other controllers. Further, experimentally, it has been demonstrated that NBBIC can be used for human-robot and multi-robot cooperation. Thus, it is expected that NBBIC is used for many of the interaction tasks.