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Which impedance strategy is the most effective for cooperative object manipulation?

Payam Zarafshan (Department of Agro-Technology, Abouraihan Collage, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran)
Reza Larimi (School of Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Kelowna, Canada)
S. Ali A. Moosavian (Center of Excellence in Robotics and Control, Advanced Robotics and Automated Systems Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran)
Bruno Siciliano (PRISMA Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy)

Industrial Robot

ISSN: 0143-991x

Article publication date: 20 March 2017

265

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparison study of cooperative object manipulation control algorithms. To this end, a full comprehensive survey of the existing control algorithms in this field is presented.

Design/methodology/approach

Cooperative manipulation occurs when manipulators are mechanically coupled to the object being manipulated, and the manipulators may not be treated as an isolated system. The most important and basic impedance control (IC) strategies for an assumed cooperative object manipulation task are the Augmented Object Model (AOM) control and the multiple impedance control (MIC) which are found based on the IC, where the former is designed based on the object movement, and the latter is designed based on the whole robot movement. Thus, the basis of these two algorithms are fully studied.

Findings

The results are fully analyzed, and it is practically verified that the MIC algorithm has the better performance. In fact, the results reveal that the MIC system could successfully perform the object manipulation task, as opposed to the AOM controller: for the same controller gains, the MIC strategy showed better performance than the AOM strategy. This means that because there is no control on the robot base with the AOM algorithm, the object manipulation task cannot be satisfactorily performed whenever the desired path is not within the robot work space. On the other hand, with the MIC algorithm, satisfactory object manipulation is achieved for a mobile robotic system in which the robot base, the manipulator endpoints and the manipulated object shall be moved.

Practical implications

A simple conceptual model for cooperative object manipulation is considered, and a suitable setup is designed for practical implementation of the two ICs.

Originality/value

The basis of these two aspects or these two algorithms is fully studied and compared which is the foundation of this paper. For this purpose, a case study is considered, in which a space free-flying robotic system, which contains two 2-degrees of freedom planar cooperative manipulators, is simulated to manipulate an object using the above control strategies. The system also includes a rotating antenna and camera as its third and fourth arm. Finally, a simple conceptual model for cooperative object manipulation is considered, and a suitable setup is designed for practical implementation of the two ICs.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the RoDyMan project, which has received funding from the European Research Council FP7 Ideas under Advanced Grant 320992.

Citation

Zarafshan, P., Larimi, R., Moosavian, S.A.A. and Siciliano, B. (2017), "Which impedance strategy is the most effective for cooperative object manipulation?", Industrial Robot, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 198-209. https://doi.org/10.1108/IR-08-2016-0216

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited

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