Highly dynamic physical interaction for robotics: design and control of an active remote center of compliance

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel Active Remote Center of Compliance (ARCC) that combines active and passive control to significantly enhance interaction dynamics and flexibility in robotic manipulation, especially for sensitive and low cycle time tasks.

Contribution

Introduction of the ARCC design and hybrid control scheme that improves interaction force control and dynamic performance over existing methods.

Findings

ARCC increases motion bandwidth by up to 31 times.

ARCC outperforms traditional schemes in industrial benchmarks.

Enhanced flexibility and responsiveness in robotic interaction control.

Abstract

Robot interaction control is often limited to low dynamics or low flexibility, depending on whether an active or passive approach is chosen. In this work, we introduce a hybrid control scheme that combines the advantages of active and passive interaction control. To accomplish this, we propose the design of a novel Active Remote Center of Compliance (ARCC), which is based on a passive and active element which can be used to directly control the interaction forces. We introduce surrogate models for a dynamic comparison against purely robot-based interaction schemes. In a comparative validation, ARCC drastically improves the interaction dynamics, leading to an increase in the motion bandwidth of up to 31 times. We introduce further our control approach as well as the integration in the robot controller. Finally, we analyze ARCC on different industrial benchmarks like peg-in-hole, top-hat rail assembly and contour following problems and compare it against the state of the art, to highlight the dynamic and flexibility. The proposed system is especially suited if the application requires a low cycle time combined with a sensitive manipulation.