Abstract
This paper presents a novel variable impedance control for a human-robot cooperative task. There is a problem that a cooperative positioning task could not be performed easy and precisely using a conventional position based impedance control. A proposed control has a virtual stiffness term in order to make the cooperative positioning task easy and precise. A proposed impedance controller generates virtual force in the positioning task using the virtual stiffness term. The virtual force helps a human operator to perform the positioning task precisely. In order to confirm the usefulness of the proposed control, a cooperative peg-in-hole task was performed. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed control is effective for the human-robot cooperative task.
