Impedance Shaping Controller for Robotic Applications in Interaction with Compliant Environments

The impedance shaping control is presented in this paper, providing an extension of standard impedance controller. The method has been conceived to avoid force overshoots in applications where there is the need to track a force reference. Force tracking performance are obtained tuning on-line both the position setpoint and the stiffness and damping parameters, based on the force error and on the estimated stiffness of the interacting environment (an Extended Kalman Filter is used). The stability of the presented strategy has been studied through Lyapunov. To validate the performance of the control an assembly task is taken into account, considering the geometrical and mechanical properties of the environment (partially) unknown. Results are compared with constant stiffness and damping impedance controllers, which show force overshoots and instabilities.