Contact dynamics of massage compliant robotic arm and its coupled stability

In this paper, contact dynamics of robot massage is described by the port-Hamiltonian modelling approach. In order to capture accurately the inherent characteristics of the human body in lumped-parameter manners, the conventional linear Kelvin-Voigt models are replaced by the nonlinear Hunt-Crossley models. As an application of the contact dynamics, coupled stability of compliant robotic arm with impedance control is theoretically analyzed from energetic viewpoints. Experiments are done to verify the massage stability. The proposed contact dynamics evidently has great potential on performance improvement of robot massage, which will be our research subject.