Analysis and Design of Direct Force Control for Robots in Contact with Uneven Surfaces

Robots executing contact tasks are essential in a wide range of industrial processes such as polishing, welding, debugging, drilling, etc. Force control is indispensable in these type of tasks since it is required to keep the interaction force (between the robot and the environment/surface) within acceptable values. In this paper, we present a methodology to analyze and to design the force control system needed to regulate the force as close as possible to the desired value. The proposed methods are presented using a widely used generic contact task consisting of exerting a desired force on the normal direction to the surface while a desired velocity/position is tracked on the tangent direction to the surface. The analysis considers environments/surfaces with certain uneven characteristics, i.e., not perfectly flat. The uneven characteristic is studied using ramp or sinusoidal signals disturbing the position on the normal direction to the surface, and we present how the velocity on the tangent direction is related with the slope of the ramp or the frequency of the sinusoidal disturbance. Then, we provide a method to design the force controller that keeps the force error within desired limits and preserves stability, despite the uneven surface. Furthermore, considering the relation between the disturbance (ramp or sinusoidal) and the tangent velocity, we present a method to compute the maximum velocity for which the task can be executed. Simulations exemplifying and verifying the proposed methods are presented.