Abstract
Impedance control is one of the most effective control methods for a robot manipulator in contact with an object. It should be noted, however, that a practical study on such a method has not been successfully applied to an industrial robot with 6 degree-of-freedom. Recently, a hybrid compliance/force control (HCC) in this field was suggested to deal with the practical problem, in which a desired damping coefficient is determined by repeating many simulations, or by trial and error. In this paper, we first propose a fuzzy environment model that can estimate the stiffness of environments and give a generation technique of fuzzy rules learned with genetic algorithms. To determine suitable compliance without trial and error, we next introduce a method that produces the desired timevarying compliance, giving the critical damping in contact with an object by using the information on the inertia matrix. Simulation results show that the proposed method is very effective for deciding the desired compliance without any complicated tuning and is very robust to the change of environment.
