Traching control of a redundant manipulator with the assistance of tactile sensing

This paper presents a method to control the end-effector of a redundant manipulator tracking the surface closely with the assistance of tactile sensing, which is based on the idea of hybrid impedance control method. Not only should the position and force control be implemented, but also the actual contacting between the end-effector and the object’s surface should be monitored and sensed. The feedback contains both the force-torque information and the tactile sensing such as contact state, contact area and so on. Then several strategies of tactile sensing feedback are proposed to combine into the control algorithm. A 5-DOF redundant manipulator equipped with force/torque and tactile sensors is applied, and simulations and two groups of real experiments for the planar tracking task are made respectively. The results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed strategies at last.