Control Strategies for Dual Arm Co-Manipulation of Flexible Objects in Industrial Environments

The introduction of collaborative robots had a great impact in the development of robotic solutions for cooperative tasks typically performed by humans, specially in industrial environments where robots can act as assistants of operators. Even so, the coordinated manipulation of large and deformable parts between dual arm robots and humans rises many technical challenges, ranging from the coordination of both robotic arms to the detection of the forces applied by the operator. This paper presents a novel control architecture for the execution of trajectory driven collaborative tasks, combining impedance control and trajectory coordination in the control loop. The obtained results demonstrate the validity of the implemented control architecture as well as its suitability for the implementation of collaborative cyber-physical systems.