Variable impedance control of a robot for cooperation with a human

Abstract

Robots are expected to be human-friendly and to execute tasks in cooperation with humans. Control systems for such robots should be designed in order to adapt human characteristics. In this paper, a variable impedance control method for robot to cooperate with human is proposed. First, the human characteristics in a cooperative task between two humans are analyzed. It is confirmed that human characteristics can be expressed by a variable impedance model. Then, we make a robot and a human to execute a cooperative task. It is shown that the impedance parameters obtained in the experiment performed by two humans give the best characteristics to the robot for cooperation with the human.