Experimental study on task space control during physical human robot interaction

In this paper new approaches for task space control during null space compliance control of a kinematically redundant robot are studied. The approaches are useful for the case where the robot experiences an external interaction on its body, especially in the human environments. The proposed algorithms guarantee safe reaction of the robot during intentional or accidental interaction by exploiting robot's redundancy through null space impedance control. The algorithms do not require joint torque measurements. The performances of the proposed controllers are verified through a variety of experiments on 7R KUKA lightweight robot arm.