Output Feedback Hybrid Force/Motion Control for Robotic Manipulators Interacting with Unknown Rigid Surfaces

Summary The problem of hybrid force and motion control over unknown rigid surfaces when only joint position measurements are available is considered. To overcome this problem, an extended state high-gain observer is designed to simultaneously estimate the contact force and joint velocities. These estimated signals are in turn employed to design a local estimator of the unknown surface gradient. This gradient is utilized to decompose the task space into two orthogonal subspaces: one for force tracking and the other one for motion control. A simple position Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) and force Proportional Integral (PI) controllers are proposed to track the desired signals. Finally, a mathematical analysis of the closed-loop dynamics is carried out, guaranteeing uniform ultimate boundedness of the position and force tracking errors and of the surface gradient estimation error. A numerical simulation is employed to validate the approach in an ideal scenario, while experiments are carried out to test the proposed strategy when uncertainties and unmodeled dynamics are present.