Dual Arm Impedance Control with a Compliant Humanoid: Application to a Valve Turning Task

In this paper, a hierarchical control architecture incorporating a novel dual-arm impedance controller is proposed and experimentally evaluated in a valve turning setup. Proposed control architecture incorporates various control/interface modules to render a desired interaction performance in our intrinsically compliant humanoid robot, COMAN: the sensing module provides the manipulation module with the valve coordinates. Consequently, smooth point-to-point and circular trajectories are generated using trajectory generation module and tracked by the implemented arm joint impedance controllers. A desired Cartesian stiffness profile in relative coordinates (between the two hands) is defined and realized by the proposed dual arm impedance controller during rotation of the valve. Experimental results suggest that the proposed COMAN control architecture renders a desirable dual-arm interaction performance while the task is being accomplished.