A Compliant Contact Control Strategy for Robot Manipulators with Unknown Environment

This paper proposes a new compliant contact control strategy for the robot manipulators accidentally interacting with an unknown environment. The main features of the proposed method are summarized as follows: First, each entry in the diagonal stiffness matrix corresponding to the task coordinate in Cartesian space is adaptively adjusted during con-tact along the corresponding axis based on the contact force with its environment. Second, it can be used for both unconstrained and constrained motions without any switching mechanism which often causes undesirable instability and/or vibrational motion of the end effector. Third, the adjusted stiffness gains are automatically recovered to initially specified stiffness gains when the task is changed from constrained motion to unconstrained motion. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method by employing a two-link direct drive manipulator interacting with an unknown environment.