Robust force control strategy based on the virtual environment concept

The main goal of this paper is to present a force control strategy based on the virtual environment concept. This concept is a way to increase the robustness of force control schemes with respect to a variation of the environment characteristics. We first propose this approach, then we analyze it and, finally, we adapt it to a classical external force control scheme. Experimental results with a DELTA fast parallel robot are presented to prove the efficiency of this method.