Detection and Control of Contact Force Transients in Robotic Manipulation Without a Force Sensor

Abstract

In this research, it is shown that robot joint torques can be used to recognize contact force transients induced during robotic manipulation, thus detecting when a task is completed. The approach does not assume any external sensor, which is a benefit compared to the state of the art. The joint torque data are used as input to a recurrent neural network (RNN), and the output of the RNN indicates whether the task is completed. A real-time application for force transient detection is developed, and verified experimentally on an industrial robot.