Learning impedance control for robotic manipulators

Most researches on learning control of constrained robots have been focused on the problem of hybrid position/force control where the learning controllers are designed to track the desired motion and force trajectories. The learning impedance control of robotic manipulators, however, has not been developed so far. In this paper, a learning impedance control problem for robotic manipulators is formulated and solved. A target impedance is specified and a learning controller is designed such that the system follows the desired response specified by the target model as the actions are repeated. Sufficient conditions for guaranteeing the convergence of the system are derived. Simulation results of a cylindrical robot are presented to illustrate the performances of the proposed learning impedance controller