A systematic design procedure of force controllers for industrial robots

In this paper, the problem of designing a force controller for industrial r obots with a positional interface is addressed. A systematic design procedu re to compute structure and parameters of the controller is devised, to pro vide a useful tool for rapid and robust setup of force control at the indus trial level. The proposed method for synthesis of the force controller simp ly requires technology parameters provided by the robot manufacturer and de sired performance expressed in nontechnical terms by the user. The automate d design algorithm will be described in detail and its effectiveness will b e proved by experiments on two different industrial robots. On the first ro botic setup, performance of the designed controllers will be evaluated by a nalyzing the experimental results of responses to canonical reference signa ls; on the second setup, controller reliability and applicability at the in dustrial level will be demonstrated through the results of a mechanical par ts mating task.