Hybrid Force/Position Control of a Very Flexible Parallel Robot Manipulator in Contact with an Environment

Abstract

There are many applications for robot manipulators and these tasks are complicated when they have interaction with environments and humans. This paper investigates a novel strategy to control a very flexible parallel manipulator interacting with an environment. The controller is complicated when the used robot manipulator is a flexible multibody dynamics system and the flexibility shall be taken into account in the modeling and controlling process. Also, interaction with an unknown environment is another challenge of our research. Hence, a sophisticated controller is designed to overcome the respective challenges. To this end, a hybrid force/position control strategy is utilized. Therefore, two controllers based on the rigid and flexible models of the robot are designed and implemented to interact with a surface. The simulation results show that the controllers based on the flexible model have a better performance than those based on the rigid model and successfully track a trajectory and interact with an environment.