Adaptive hybrid force/position control for an industrial robot: theory and experiments

This paper proposes a feasible force/position control method for industrial robots utilized for such tasks as grinding, polishing, deburring, and so on. Specifically, an adaptive force/position control strategy is designed in this paper which regulates the contact force between a robot and a workpiece to reach any given set-point exponentially fast, and enables the robot to follow a chosen trajectory simultaneously without requiring prior knowledge of the system parameters. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed by Lyapunov techniques. To test the validity of the force/position control method, some simulation results are first collected for the closed-loop system. Furthermore, some experiments are implemented on a 5DOF (degree of freedom) industrial robot for the constructed adaptive force controller. Both simulation and experiment results demonstrate the superior performance of the designed adaptive force/position control strategy.