Position and Force Control of Two CRS A460 Robots Manipulating a Flexible Sheet: Theory and Experiment

Abstract

It is verified in theory and experiment that through proper design of the control gains, the simple PD position feedback can control a flexible sheet manipulated by two industrial robots to a desired position while regulating its deformations at the contacts to zero. The offsets of all static deformations of the sheet with reference to the original positions decay to zero. A hybrid controller is further developed to control the motion of the sheet as well as its interactions with the manipulators by adding a force feedforward term to the PD scheme. This is the first time that conventional PD control has been shown to be applicable for use in the manipulation of flexible payload.