Development of Mechanical-Impedance-Varying Mechanism in Admittance Control

There have been numerous studies on the physical human-robot cooperative task system with impedance/admittance control in robot motion control. However, the problem of stability persists, wherein the control system becomes unstable when the robot comes into contact with a highly stiff environment. A variable impedance control strategy was proposed to circumvent this stability problem. However, a number of studies on variable impedance control are based on the variation of a parameter in the robot motion control software, and a mechanical variable impedance control has not been proposed. The purpose of this research is to propose a mechanical variable impedance control strategy using a mechanical device based on the lever principle. The proposed mechanism can adjust the magnitude of the input force to the force sensor by changing the position of application of the operating force on the beam. Adjusting the magnitude of the input force to the force sensor is equivalent to varying the impedance parameters of the robot; therefore, it is feasible to achieve mechanical variable impedance control using the proposed mechanism. In this study, the gain adjustment characteristics of the proposed mechanism were evaluated. The experimental results demonstrated that the operator can vary the impedance parameters of the robot by mechanically adjusting the input force to the force sensor and operating the robot using the proposed mechanism.