Low-Force Kinesthetic Guidance for Accurate Positioning and Tracking

Abstract

This paper considers the application of a low-force robotic manipulator to guide a human user’s movement to locate a tool at a predetermined position or to move a tool along a predetermined trajectory. In this application, the guid-ance must be sufficiently smooth because the user’s force can easily overcome the guiding force. The proxy-based sliding mode control, which we previously proposed, is capable of achieving a smooth overdamped convergence to a given po-sition, without overshoots, with a limited actuator torque. This paper proposes the application of the proxy-based slid-ing mode control to low-force kinesthetic guidance. Experi-mental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this applica-tion, showing that the time constant of the guidance control should be set around 0.1 sec rather than 0.01 sec or 0.5 sec.