Combined path following and compliance control with application to a biaxial gantry robot

This work presents an approach to simultaneously, but independently control the compliance of a robotic system transversal and tangential to a given curve. Therefore, a path following control concept known as transverse feedback linearization and a compliance control concept known as admittance control are combined. The subordinate path following controller transforms the nonlinear dynamics into a linear system with decoupled transversal and tangential dynamics via a coordinate and feedback transformation. The outer control loop utilizes admittance control to obtain the desired target compliance in the respective transformed coordinates. The proposed approach is applied to a biaxial gantry robot. Experimental results underline the feasibility of the proposed concept.