Abstract:

Developing control schemes for different tasks that require extensive contact with the environment such as grinding, contour following, deburring, assembling, surface cleaning, and so on, has been the important subject of research in robotics area. The main purpose of this thesis is to design a force controller and achieve good tracking performance when the robot makes in contact with the environment. Impedance control is one of the main force control schemes in literature; however, classical impedance control lacks force tracking capability. Therefore, this thesis proposes a stable adaptive force tracking impedance control scheme and a self-tuning regulator of impedance parameters, which have the capability to track specified desired force under uncertainties in environment position and stiffness. In order to verify the proposed controller, a two link rotary robot manipulator model is constructed in SimMechanics, and the entire control algorithm is built in MATLAB/Simulink. Simulation studies are shown to demonstrate tracking performance of the proposed two adaptive schemes under uncertainties in environment position and stiffness. Experiments are constructed by using the NI sbRIO-9632 and the 6-axis NTU Arm, which is developed by our laboratory.