Impedance-control based peg-in-hole assembly with a 6 DOF manipulator

The maximum accuracy of position control by using an industrial robot is about 100μm, whereas the maximum tolerated imprecision in the position of precision parts is about several tens of micrometers. Therefore, it is very difficult to assemble parts by position control only. Moreover, in the case of precision assembly, jamming or wedging can easily occur because of small position/orientation errors, which may damage the parts to be assembled. To overcome these problems, we investigated a force control scheme that provides proper motion in response to the contact force. In this study, we constructed a force control system that can be easily implemented in a position-controlled manipulator. Impedance control by using an admittance filter was adopted to perform stable contact tasks. It is shown that the precision parts can be assembled well by adopting impedance control and blind search methods.