Stability of the Robot Compliant Motion control - Part 1 : Theory

This two-part paper presents a control method that allows for stable interaction of a robot manipulator with the environment. In part 1, we focus on the input ouput relationships (unstructured modeling) of the robot and environment dynamics. This analysis leads to a general condition for stability of the robot and environment taken as a whole. This stability condition, for stable maneuver, prescribes a finite sensitivity for robot and environment where sensitivity of the robot(or the environment) is defined as a mapping forces into displacement. According to this stability condition, smaller sensitivity either in robot or in environment leads to narrower stability range. In the limit, when both systems have zero sensitivity, stability cannot be guaranteed. These models do not have any particular structure, yet they can model a wide variety of industrial and research robot manipulators and environment dynamic behavior. Although this approach of modeling may not lead to any design procedure, it will allow us to understand the fundamental issues in stability when a robot interacts with an environment.