Towards the development of a humanoid arm by minimizing interaction forces through minimum impedance control

Abstract

1 Abstract In this paper, we present the results from our work in the development of a robotic arm with minimal impedance. The development of such an arm is use- ful for gentle exploration of unknown objects in un- structured environments. Similar to a human, the robotic arm should minimize the contact forces in the event of unanticipated contact with unknown ob- jects in the absence of visual feedback. To accom- plish this, our strategy is to develop a good model of the robotic system so that we can use low gains which in turn will lead to low impedance and hence low contact forces in manipulation tasks in unstruc- tured environments. The novel idea about this pa- per is to demonstrate how good modeling and feed- forward compensation can result in low interaction forces without any external force sensing. We present numerous experimental results to demonstrate the validity of our model and approach.