A Hybrid Position/Force Controller for Joint Robots
This work addresses control challenges for joint robots in applications such as polishing and manipulation, but it appears incremental as it builds on traditional methods with a hybrid approach.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling joint robots for both motion tracking and force regulation by proposing a hybrid controller that decouples these goals using a smooth mapping from joint to task space, with simulations validating its efficacy in tasks like contour tracking and box grabbing.
In this paper, we present a hybrid position/force controller for operating joint robots. The hybrid controller has two goals -- motion tracking and force regulating. As long as these two goals are not mutually exclusive, they can be decoupled in some way. In this work, we make use of the smooth and invertible mapping from joint space to task space to decouple the two control goals and design controllers separately. The traditional motion controller in task space is used for motion control, while the force controller is designed through manipulating the desired trajectory to regulate the force indirectly. Two case studies -- contour tracking/polishing surfaces and grabbing boxes with two robotic arms -- are presented to show the efficacy of the hybrid controller, and simulations with physics engines are carried out to validate the efficacy of the proposed method.