Synthesis of Hybrid Impedance Control Strategies for Robot Manipulators

This paper presents a new method to automatically synthesize robot compliant motions based on hybrid impedance control. The scheme relies on decoupled linear impedance models of the robot and the environment, in which the errors due to control, task frame estimation, as well as environment uncertainty are explicitly taken into account. The technique consists of selecting appropriate manipulator impedances to match the environment dynamics and satisfy all the task goals. Two experimental examples of this methodology are presented.