Adaptive Force Control Single Link Mechanical Devices for Robots

An adaptive controller to achieve a pure tracking force objective for single link mechanical devices is presented in this paper. The main features of the proposed algorithm are: i) the dynamic parameters of the mechanical device -which is possibly nonlinear- are assumed to be unknown, ii)object stiffness is unknown, iii) only position, velocity and interaction force are required. The scheme is shown to be globally stable in the sense that force tracking error converges to zero.