On force control in human physical skill

Abstract

We analyze some aspects of human physical skill and propose a model thereof, with a view to implementing such skills in robots. We implement our model in a control scheme which makes use of impedance control in combination with low-gain force control and feedforward control. The summation results show that the model is able to achieve the reference force, and at the same time, the manipulator shows impedance-type behavior. Furthermore, with this scheme it is possible to track the reference force quickly, when the disturbance is known apriori. The experiments show that the performance of our control scheme is very close to that of the human operator.