An Adaptive Manual Guidance Formulation with Force-Tracking Control for Industrial Cooperative Tasks

The paper describes an impedance control based approach for human-robot interaction (HRI) control in forcetracking industrial tasks execution for standard industrial manipulators. The developed method allows to set decoupled free-motion Cartesian task direction(s) and force-constrained Cartesian task direction(s), setting in real-time the set-point of the impedance control (i) for manual guidance purposes (along free-motion directions, defining a variable set-point deformation law for fine or large robot positioning) and (ii) for force tracking purposes (along force-constrained directions, implementing an impedance force-tracking control law). A force-tracking task has been carried out to demostrate the performance of the combined manual guidance-force tracking control law. Experimental results show the proper force tracking along the force constrained direction, while the manipulator can be moved along free-motion directions.