Background: For many co-manipulative applications, variable damping is a valuable feature provided by robots. One approach is implementing a high viscosity at low velocities and a low viscosity at high velocities. This, however, is proven to have the possibility to alter human natural motion performance.
Methods: We show that the distortion is caused by the viscosity drop resulting in robot's resistance to motion. To address this, a method for stably achieving the desired behaviour is presented. It involves leveraging a first-order linear filter to slow the viscosity variation down.
Results: The proposition is supported by a theoretical analysis using a robotic model. Meanwhile, the user performance in human-robot experiments gets significantly improved, showing the practical efficiency in real applications.
Conclusions: This paper discusses the variable viscosity control in the context of co-manipulation. An instability problem and its solution were theoretically shown and experimentally evidenced through human-robot experiments.
Keywords: HRI; co-manipulation; human-robot interaction; impedance control; stability; viscosity control.
© 2022 The Authors. The International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.