Variable impedance control with virtual stiffness for human-robot cooperative peg-in-hole task

This paper presents a novel variable impedance control for a human-robot cooperative task. Cooperative positioning tasks cannot be performed easily using a conventional position based impedance controller. The proposed controller has a virtual stiffness term in order to make the cooperative positioning task easy and precise. It generates a virtual force in the positioning task using the virtual stiffness term. The virtual force helps the human operator to perform the positioning task easily. In order to confirm the usefulness of the proposed control, a cooperative peg-in-hole task was performed. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed control is effective for the human-robot cooperative task.