Adaptive admittance control: an approach to explicit force control in compliant motion

This paper addresses the problem of controlling a manipulator in compliant motion while in contact with an environment having an unknown stiffness. Admittance control is used as an explicit force control scheme in which a force setpoint is specified and is tracked by the force compensator. Two adaptive PID and PI force compensators are proposed. The compensators ensure robust tracking of step force setpoints and rejection of constant disturbances. Since the environmental stiffness can typically vary by several orders of magnitude, compensator adaptation is used to ensure a stable and uniform system performance. Dynamic simulation results for a 7 DOF Robotics Research arm are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed admittance control scheme in executing contact tasks