Smooth reaching and human-like compliance in physical interactions for redundant arms

Abstract

This work collectively addresses human-like smoothness and compliance to external contact force in reaching tasks of redundant robotic arms, enhancing human safety potential and facilitating physical human-robot interaction. A model based prescribed performance control algorithm is proposed, producing smooth, repeatable reaching movements for the arm and a compliant behavior to an external contact by shaping the reaching target superimposing the position output from a human-like impedance model. Simulation results for a 5dof human-arm like robot demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller. © Springer International Publishing 2013.