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Dynamical system based variable admittance control for physical human-robot interaction

Feifei Bian, Danmei Ren, Ruifeng Li, Peidong Liang, Ke Wang, Lijun Zhao

Industrial Robot

ISSN: 0143-991X

Article publication date: 15 May 2020

Issue publication date: 19 June 2020

490

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to enable robots to intelligently adapt their damping characteristics and motions in a reactive fashion toward human inputs and task requirements during physical human–robot interaction.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper exploits a combination of the dynamical system and the admittance model to create robot behaviors. The reference trajectories are generated by dynamical systems while the admittance control enables robots to compliantly follow the reference trajectories. To determine how control is divided between the two models, a collaborative arbitration algorithm is presented to change their contributions to the robot motion based on the contact forces. In addition, the authors investigate to model the robot’s impedance characteristics as a function of the task requirements and build a novel artificial damping field (ADF) to represent the virtual damping at arbitrary robot states.

Findings

The authors evaluate their methods through experiments on an UR10 robot. The result shows promising performances for the robot to achieve complex tasks in collaboration with human partners.

Originality/value

The proposed method extends the dynamical system approach with an admittance control law to allow a robot motion being adjusted in real time. Besides, the authors propose a novel ADF method to model the robot’s impedance characteristics as a function of the task requirements.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB1301600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61673136) and the High Level Talent Project of Quanzhou City under Grant No.2017ZT015.

Citation

Bian, F., Ren, D., Li, R., Liang, P., Wang, K. and Zhao, L. (2020), "Dynamical system based variable admittance control for physical human-robot interaction", Industrial Robot, Vol. 47 No. 4, pp. 623-635. https://doi.org/10.1108/IR-12-2019-0258

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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