Implementation of Compliant Motion Control Schemes on the Stewart Platform

Compliant motion control encompasses all control schemes that deal with tasks in which a robot interacts with its environment and pure motion control cannot guarantee a safe and robust behavior of the manipulator. Investigations on improving prosthetic feet with the help of Real-time Substructuring have arisen the need for compliant motion control for the Stewart platform at the Chair of Applied Mechanics at the Technical University of Munich. In the context of this thesis, a general overview of compliant motion control schemes most commonly found in literature is given and a hybrid position/force control as well as a position-based impedance control scheme are designed, implemented, tested, validated and compared on the Chair’s Stewart Platform. The investigations show that position-based impedance control is especially suitable for control tasks which require compliant movement within a specified region of attraction because it controls the admittance behavior of the robot-environment interaction. While hybrid position/force control exhibits larger computational costs for parallel robots, it offers the ability to prescribe specific contact force/torque values. The findings gathered within this work can be further studied and applied on the Real-time Substructuring approach as well as on any tasks that require compliant motion control on the Chair’s Stewart platform.