An Experimental Evaluation and Comparison of Explicit Force Control Strategies for Robotic Manipulators

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental evaluation and comparison of basic strategies that have been proposed for force control of robot manipulators. This experimental review of force control methodologies is unique in its breadth - never has such a complete spectrum of strategies been experimentally compared on the same system. The commonality amongst the experiments has permitted the ability to objectively compare and contrast these strategies, and draw conclusions about the efficacy of each. As will be seen, the results support our previous analysis and show the superiority of integral force control for force trajectory tracking.