Synthesis of robust compliant motions based on impedance models

This paper presents a new approach to the problem of control synthesis and motion planning for compliant motions of manipulators. The scheme is based on decoupled linear impedance models of the robot and the environment, in which the errors due to control, task frame estimation, as well as environment uncertainty are explicitly taken into account. The technique consists of characterizing the position, velocity and force responses of the decoupled models, and expressing the task goals as constraints on these expressions. The impedance parameters of the controller are found by fitting uncertainty boxes inside the region of the parameter space that satisfies all task constraints. An experimental verification of this method is presented for the task of closing a circuit breaker