A passivity based Cartesian impedance controller for flexible joint robots -: Part II:: Full state feedback, impedance design and experiments

The paper presents a Cartesian impedance controller for flexible joint robots based on the feedback of the complete state of the system, namely the motor position, the joint torque and their derivatives. The approach is applied to a quite general robot model, in which also a damping element is considered in parallel to the joint stiffness. Since passivity and asymptotic stability of the controller hold also for varying damping matrices, some possibilities of designing those gain matrices (depending on the actual inertia matrix) are addressed. The passivity of the controller relies on the usage of only motor side measurements for the position feedback. A method is introduced, which provides the exact desired link side stiffness based on this motor position information. Experimental results are validating the proposed controller.