External Force Control for Two Dimensional Contour Following ; Part 1. A Linear Control Approach

The ability of a robot system to comply to an environment via the control of tool-environment interaction force is of vital for the successful task accomplishment in many robot application. This paper presents the implementation of external force control for two dimensional contour following task using a commercial robot system. Force accommodation is used since a constraint imposed in our work is not to modify the commercial robot system. A linear, decoupled model of two dimensional contour following system in the discrete time domain is derived first. Then the experimental verification of linear control is obtained using a PUMA 560 manipulator with standard Unimation controller, Astek FS6-120A six axis wrist force sensor attached externally to the arm and LSI-11173 microcomputer. Experimentally obtained data shows that the RMS contact force error is 0.8246 N when following the straight edge and 2.3768 N when following 40 mm radius curved contour.