Adaptive position/force control for robot manipulators in contact with a rigid surface with unknown parameters

Most position/force control schemes assume that the contact surface is exactly known. In the presence of constraint uncertainties these controllers cannot ensure convergence to zero of position and force errors. In this work, an adaptive scheme is proposed for robot manipulators that perform interaction tasks with a rigid surface. The proposed algorithm takes into account uncertainties in robot and surface parameters. Also, it locally estimates the surface by means of force measurements. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the good performance of our approach.