Title: Developing adaptable joint admittance control in a virtual robotic testbed

Authors: Eric Guiffo Kaigom; Jürgen Roßmann

Addresses: Institute for Man-Machine Interaction, RWTH-Aachen University, Ahornstrasse 55, Aachen, Germany ' Institute for Man-Machine Interaction, RWTH-Aachen University, Ahornstrasse 55, Aachen, Germany

Abstract: Over the past years, eRobotics has been proving itself to be a flexible and efficient approach to tackle highly complex issues in research and application areas of robotics and automation, including planetary exploration, orbital servicing, sustainable forest management and industrial manufacturing. One of the main objectives of eRobotics is to bring robotics know-how into the fields of virtual reality and simulation on the basis of a holistic simulation approach that swiftly adapts to new demands and lays the foundation for the development of new technologies. Following this line of ideas, we introduce in this paper a novel systematical and highly modular approach to endow an open-chain robot manipulator with adaptable joint admittance control on a robot simulator. A three-stage admittance, position and torque control is developed to provide a desired joint admittance when external torques are sensed. The joint admittance is adapted by inferring the human intension to accelerate and decelerate during interaction in an intuitive and simple fashion. Experiments carried out on a physical 7 DoF KUKA LWR 4+ reveal that the proposed approach substantially reduces the robot resistance felt by the operator, therefore enhancing considerably the ease of manipulation.

Keywords: e-robotics; simulation; joint admittance control; virtual robotic testbed; robot control; virtual reality; torque control; position control; open-chain manipulators; ease of manipulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMA.2014.064103

International Journal of Mechatronics and Automation, 2014 Vol.4 No.3, pp.200 - 211

Received: 05 Nov 2013
Accepted: 16 Feb 2014
Published online: 04 Sep 2014 *

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