This paper deals with the problem of controlling contact forces in robotic manipulators with general kinematics. The main focus is on control of grasping contact forces exerted on the manipulated object. A visco-elastic model for contacts is adopted. The robustness of the decoupling controller with respect to the uncertainties affecting system parameters is investigated. Sufficient conditions for the invariance of decoupling action under perturbations on the contact stiffness and damping parameters...

This paper considers the data-based identification of industrial robots using an instrumental variable method that uses off-line estimation of the joint velocities and acceleration signals based only on the measurement of the joint positions. The usual approach to this problem relies on a ‘tailor-made’ prefiltering procedure for estimating the derivatives that depends on good prior knowledge of the system's bandwidth. The paper describes an alternative Integrated Random Walk SMoothing (IRWSM) method...