Hardware design on an FPGA chip of impedance force control for interaction between a human operator and a robot arm

This paper presents the development of interface hardware for interaction between robot arms called the ROBOKER and human arms. Hardware design of impedance force control scheme along with the robust position control method on a single FPGA chip by the hardware description language is presented. Force induced by a human operator is transformed into a position command for the robot arm to move so that it mimics handshaking between a robot arm and a human operator. To achieve better interaction of feeling, position commands are filtered by the impedance function. Experimental results confirm the functionality of the designed hardware implementation. Successful experiments are demonstrated.