An Approach to Motion and Force Control of Coordinated Robot Arms in the Presence of Joint Flexibility

Abstract

A system consisting of several flexible joint robot arms is studied in this paper. The paper addresses the motion and force control problem of such systems. A coordinating controller, consisting of a motion controller, contact force controller, and internal force controller, is designed to distribute the load between the coordinated flexible joint robot arms, and control the motion of the object, the internal force and contact force between the object and the environment, as well generate the desired joint elastic force. The system stability is analyzed based on Lyapunov stability theory. It is shown that with the proposed controller the motion and force control variables can be regulated to track asymptotically their desired trajectories. Simulation results are given to illustrate the performance of the proposed controller.