Adaptive compliant motion control of position-controlled manipulators

This paper presents a new adaptive compliant motion control scheme for position-controlled manipulators. The strategy does not require knowledge of the manipulator dynamic model, the position controller parameters, or the environment, and is extremely simple computationally. It is shown that the control scheme ensures global boundedness of all signals if the inner-loop position controller has a PD structure and that the ultimate bounds on the size of the force and position errors can be made arbitrarily small in this case. If the inner-loop position controller has a PD-plus-gravity-compensation structure then the stability is shown to be asymptotic. Experimental results are presented for the Robotics Research Corporation (RRC) Model K-1207 redundant robot and demonstrate that the control scheme provides a simple and effective means of obtaining high performance force control