Reference Adaptation for Robots in Physical Interactions With Unknown Environments

In this paper, we propose a method of reference adaptation for robots in physical interactions with unknown environments. A cost function is constructed to describe the interaction performance, which combines trajectory tracking error and interaction force between the robot and the environment. It is minimized by the proposed reference adaptation based on trajectory parametrization and iterative learning. An adaptive impedance control is developed to make the robot be governed by the target impedance model. Simulation and experiment studies are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.