An experimental study on improving hybrid position/force control of a robot using time delay control

Robot position/force control has been a difficult task owing to the interaction between a robot and the environment. In addition to the dynamic instability, the interaction causes the following problems: (1) the dynamic coupling effect of the robot; (2) positional disturbance due to the uncertain surface of the environment with which the robot is in contact; and (3) vibration at steady state. To solve these problems, time delay control (TDC), well known for its robustness to plant uncertainties and disturbances, has been used as a baseline control law for hybrid control. In conjunction with TDC, the following three ideas were also used. (i) To reduce the dynamic coupling, a more accurate mass matrix was used instead of the constant mass matrix. (ii) To reject positional disturbance from the environment, force derivatives instead of position derivatives were used in the TDC law. (iii) Finally, to reduce the amplitude of the vibration at steady state, a novel scheme was adopted to enhance the resolution of A/D conversion for the force sensor. Experiments showed obvious improvements in the quality of the hybrid control, thereby clearly demonstrating the effectiveness of TDC with the proposed ideas.