Direct Compliance Control of Manipulator Arms - Basic Concept and Application Examples

Abstract

This paper proposes a new compliance control scheme for robot arm. The end-effector compliance of robot arm can be specified by directly altering its joint stiffness, which is based on the considerations of human stiffness control by skeletal muscles. A framework of this approach is described for a generalized arm, and several features are explored in comparison with the conventional compliance control scheme. Two-dimensional arm is taken as an application example and the decoupling condition of end-effector compliance matrix is analyzed for both serial arm and parallel arm. Finally, some experimental verifications are performed by using one finger of robot hand with the capability of joint compliance control.