Impedance Control as a Particular Case of the Unified Approach to the Control of Robots Interacting with a Dynamic Known Environment

This paper investigates the problem of impendance control using a unified approach to contact tasks control in robotics, where the interpretation of the contact between the robot and its known environment is based on a sufficiently correct treating of interaction between the environment and robot dynamics. Apart from brief survey of all more important results in the field of impedance control, it will be shown that, from the standpoint of the active compliance method which considers the control with respect to position and force simultaneously, impedance control can be considered as one particular case. The direct aim of the paper is to improve the transient dynamic response immediately after the contact. In that way the performance of impedance control is improved just in the phase in which its quality is of decisive importance.