Cooperative control of multimanipulator based on workspace disturbance observer considering the interaction with external force environments

This paper presents a method to realize a cooperative control of multimanipulator based on workspace disturbance observer where the dynamics of the system is modeled as a pure mass matrix while the other unmodeled components are included as the internal disturbance. The observer estimates the total disturbance force and simultaneously cancels it by adding the estimated disturbance to the output of the controller such that the observer forms an acceleration based motion control system which offers a simple, robust and flexible system. The resulting cooperative control scheme can easily be set to position/force, impedance or compliant motion control that more suitable with the operation condition of the cooperative system such as interaction with external force environments. The influence of external forces to the position/force cooperative control scheme is investigated through some experiments where the results show that the proposed method can achieve a good performance.