Mechanical Impedance Control of Cooperative Robot During Object Manipulation Based on External Force Estimation Using Recurrent Neural Network

This paper proposes a compliant motion control for human-cooperative robots to absorb collision force when persons accidentally touch the robots even while the robot is manipulating an object. In the proposed method, an external force estimator, which can distinguish the net external force from the object manipulation force, is realized using an inverse dynamics model acquired by a recurrent neural network (RNN). By implementing a mechanical impedance control to the estimated external force, the robot can quickly and precisely carry the object keeping the mechanical impedance control functioned and can generate a compliant motion to the net external force only when the person touches it during manipulation. Since the proposed method estimates the external force from the generalized force based on the learned inverse dynamics, it is not necessary to install any sensors on the manipulated object to measure the external force. This allows the robot to detect the collision even when the person touches anywhere on the manipulated object. The RNN inverse dynamics model is evaluated by the leave-one-out cross-validation and it was found that it works well for unknown trajectories excluded from the learning process. Although the details were omitted due to the limitation of the page length, similar to the simulations, the RNN inverse dynamics model was evaluated using unknown trajectories in the six degree-of-freedom experiments, and it has been verified that it functions properly even for the unknown trajectories. Finally, the validity of the proposed method has been confirmed by experiments in which a person touches a robot while it is manipulating an object with six degrees of freedom.