Force control of redundant robots in unstructured environment

In this paper, a method for force control of redundant robots in an unstructured environment is proposed. We assume that the obstacles are not known in advance. Hence, the robot arm has to be compliant with the environment while tracking the desired position and force at the end-effector. First, the dynamic properties of the internal motion of redundant manipulators are considered. The motion is decoupled into the end-effector motion and the internal motion. Next, the dynamic model of a redundant manipulator is derived. Special attention is given to the inertial properties of the system in the space where internal motion is taking place; the authors define a null-space effective inertia and its inverse. Finally, a control method is proposed which completely decouples the motion of the manipulator into the task-space motion and the internal motion and enables the selection of dynamic characteristics in both subspaces separately. The proposed method is verified with simulation and with experimental results of a four-degrees-of-freedom planar redundant robot.