Passivity-Based Adaptive Force-Impedance Control for Modular Multi-Manual Object Manipulation

There exist robotic tasks such as cumbersome object manipulation for which one arm alone is not sufficient and a team of robots should be employed. For such a multi-manual system, a control policy must be defined to meet the task objective. This letter presents a modular uni-arm control law for a multi-manual object manipulation task. Following the concept of force and impedance control, a novel adaptation policy is introduced which mitigates the intrinsic limitations of conventional methods such as the coupled impedance and hybrid position/force control approaches. To ensure the stability of the proposed control algorithm, passivity analysis is performed and a virtual energy tank is augmented to the multi-manual system. Finally, a set of experiments with a bi-manual setup manipulating an object is carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed control approach.