Force sensor-less workspace virtual impedance control considering resonant vibration for industrial robot

The motion control paradigm provides sufficient performance in many elementary industrial tasks. However, only stiff motion the robot cannot accommodate the interaction force under constrained motion. In such situation, the robot is required to perform interaction behavior with the environment. The conventional impedance control schemes require force-sensing devices to feedback force signals to the controllers. The force-sensing device is therefore indispensable and the performance of the system also depends on the quality of this device. This paper proposes a novel strategy for force sensor-less impedance control using disturbance observer and dynamic model of the robot to estimate the external force. In motion task, the robust D-PD (derivative-PD) control is used with feedforward inverse-dynamic torque compensation to ensure robustness and high-speed response with flexible joint model. When robot is in contact with environment, the proposed force sensor-less scheme impedance control with inner-loop D-PD control is utilized. D-PD control uses both position and speed as the references to implement the damping and stiffness characteristic of the virtual impedance model. In addition, the gravity and friction force-feedback compensation is computed by the same dynamic model, which is used in external force estimation. The flexible-joint robot model is utilized in both disturbance observer and motion control design. The workspace impedance control for robot interaction with human operator is implemented on the experimental setup three-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) robot manipulator to assure the ability and performance of the proposed force sensor-less scheme for flexible-joint industrial robot.