A parallel low-impedance sensing approach for highly responsive physical human-robot interaction

This paper presents a novel sensing approach for the physical interaction between a human user and a serial robotic arm. The approach is inspired from the concept of macro-mini robot architecture. The framework is developed for a general multi-degree-of-freedom serial robot and a corresponding impedance control scheme is proposed. In order to illustrate the concept, a five-degree-of-freedom robotic arm was built as well as a six-degree-of-freedom low-impedance sensing device that is used to control the robot. Experimental results are provided.