A Review of: “Fuzzy Sets and Their Applications”. By C. V. NEGOIT[Abreve] and D. A. RALESCU. (In Rumanian) (Bucharest: Editura Technica, 1974.) [Pp.219.]

This paper presents a new controller for position and force control of robotic devices interacting with passive environments. In this approach, for the manipulator dynamics in joint space, suitable output equations are defined which represent the position control and force control subspaces. The dynamics of the manipulator are projected along these subspaces to obtain the dynamics in the respective subspaces. The resulting dynamics are linearized and decoupled using a nonlinear input-state linearizing controller. For the position control subspace dynamics, desirable stability features are achieved through pole placement design. Along the force control subspace, a soft base is introduced, the compliance effect of which is controlled by an appropriate compensation term. Based on the force feedback information, this compensation is modifed online using an extended dynamics. Assuming a model of the passive environment, aspects of local stability of the controller have been discussed. The theory has been presented for a two-link planar manipulator example, based on which, a numerical simulation is discussed.