An experimental investigation on impedance control for dual-arm cooperative systems

In this paper, an experimental comparison between different impedance control approaches for cooperative manipulators is presented. The experiments have been performed on a dual-arm setup composed by two six-dof industrial manipulators carrying a common object. A general impedance control scheme is adopted, which encompasses a centralized impedance control strategy aimed at conferring a compliant behavior at the object level, and a decentralized impedance control, enforced at the end-effector level, aimed at avoiding large internal loading of the object. The scheme allows individual activation/deactivation of each impedance strategy. The experimental investigation concerns the four different controller configurations that can be achieved by activating/deactivating the single impedance controllers.