Theory and Experiments on the Compliance Control of Redundant Robot Manipulators

Abstract
This work presents a control methodology for compliant motion in redundant robot manipulators. This control approach takes advantage of the redundancy in the robot’s degrees of freedom: while a maximum six degrees of freedom of the robot control the robot’s endpoint position, the remaining degrees of freedom impose an appropriate force on the environment. To verify the applicability of this control method, an active end-effector is mounted on an industrial robot to generate redundancy in the degrees of freedom. A set of experiments are described to demonstrate the use of this control method in constrained maneuvers. The stability of the robot and the environment is analyzed.