Interaction control experiments for a robot with one flexible link

Abstract

One of the major drawbacks of flexible-link robot applications is its low tip precision, which is an essential characteristic for applications with interaction control with a contact surface. In this work, interaction control strategies considering rigid and flexible contact surfaces are applied on a two degrees of mobility flexible-link manipulator. The interaction strategies are based on the closed-loop inverse kinematics algorithm (CLIK) to obtain the angular references to the joint position controller. The control schemes were previously tested by simulation and further implemented on the flexible-link robot. The obtained experimental results exhibit a good force tracking performance, especially for a rigid surface, and reveal the successful implementation of these control architectures for a robot with one flexible link. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.