Admittance control for human-robot interaction using an industrial robot equipped with a F/T sensor

We present an approach to safe physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) for industrial robots, including collision detection, distinguishing accidental from intentional contacts, and achieving collaborative tasks. Typical industrial robots have a closed control architecture that accepts only velocity/position reference inputs, there are no joint torque sensors, and little or no information is available to the user on robot dynamics and on low-level joint controllers. Nonetheless, taking also advantage of the presence of a Force/Torque (F/T) sensor at the end-effector, a safe pHRI strategy based on kinematic information, on measurements from joint encoders and motor currents, and on end-effector forces/torques can be realized. An admittance control law has been implemented for collaboration in manual guidance mode, with whole-body collision detection in place both when the robot is in autonomous operation and when is simultaneously collaborating with a human. Several pHRI experiments validate the approach on a KUKA KR5 Sixx R650 robot equipped with an ATI F/T sensor.