Adaptive modular vector field control for robot contact tasks in uncertain environment

This paper proposes an adaptive modular vector field control (AMVFC) approach for a robot manipulator to interact with its uncertain environmental geometric constraints. Started from the uncertain geometric model of the environment, the approach first parameterizes the desired velocity vector field of the robot by the weighted combination of a set of basis vector fields. Then, to overcome the influences from the environmental model uncertainties, force feedback is added to adjust robot dynamics as well as the weight parameters of the desired velocity field for the robot to approach the real environment. Simulations of a robot interacting with an uncertain circle show the effectiveness of our approach.