When mating parts are brought together, small misalignments must be accommodated by responding to contact forces. Using force feedback, a robot may sense contact forces during assembly and invoke a response to guide the parts into their correct mating positions. The proposed approach integrates force-guided strategies into Hogan's impedance control. Stability of both geometric convergence and of contact dynamics are achieved. Geometric convergence is accomplished more reliably than through the use of impedance control alone, and such a convergence is achieved more rapidly than through the use of force-guided strategies alone. This work was published in the ICRA 1995 video proceedings.

The videod results of an experimental study of impedance control schemes for a robot manipulator in contact with the environment are presented. Six-DOF interaction tasks are considered that require the implementation of a spatial impedance described in terms of both its translational and its rotational parts. Two representations of end-effector orientation are adopted, namely, Euler angles and quaternions, and the implications for the choice of different orientation displacements are discussed. The controllers are tested on an industrial robot with open-control architecture in a number of case studies. This work was published in A. Casals, A.T. de Almeida (Eds.): Experimental Robotics V, Lect. Note. Control Inform. Sci. 232 (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 1998)

The video contains work developed in the PhD thesis of Joris De Schutter, where the concept of compliant motion based on external force feedback loops and on the task frame formalism to specify interaction tasks were introduced. The video was recorded in 1984. The references for this video are 1. J. De Schutter, H. Van Brussel: Compliant robot motion II. A control approach based on external control loops, Int. J. Robot. Res. 7(4), 18-33 (1988) 2. J. De Schutter, H. Van Brussel: Compliant robot motion I. A formalism for specifying compliant motion tasks, Int. J. Robot. Res. 7(4), 3-17 (1988)

The video collects works on force control developed in the 1970s-1980s and 1990s at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. The tasks were programmed and simulated using the task-frame-based software package COMRADE (compliant motion research and development environment). The video was recorded in the mid-1990s. The main references for the video are: 1. H. Van Brussel, J. Simons: The adaptable compliance concept and its use for automatic assembly by active force feedback accommodations, Proc. 9th Int. Symposium Indust. Robot., Washington (1979), pp.167-181 2. J. Simons, H. Van Brussel, J. De Schutter, J. Verhaert: A self-learning automaton with variable resolution for high precision assembly by industrial robots, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control 27(5), 1109-1113 (1982) 3. J. De Schutter, H. Van Brussel: Compliant robot motion II. A control approach based on external control loops, Int. J. Robot. Res. 7(4), 18-33 (1988) 3.J. De Schutter, H. Van Brussel: Compliant robot motion I. A formalism for specifying compliant motion tasks, Int. J. Robot. Res. 7(4), 3-17 (1988) 4. W. Witvrouw, P. Van de Poel, H. Bruyninckx, J. De Schutter: ROSI: A task specification and simulation tool for force-sensor-based robot control, Proc. 24th Int. Symp. Indust. Robot., Tokyo (1993), pp. 385-392 5. W. Witvrouw, P. Van de Poel, J. De Schutter: COMRADE: Compliant motion research and development environment, Proc. 3rd IFAC/IFIP Workshop on Algorithms and Architecture for Real-Time Control. Ostend (1995), pp. 81-87 6. H. Bruyninckx, S. Dutre, J. De Schutter: Peg-on-hole, a model-based solution to peg and hole alignment, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. (ICRA), Nagoya (1995), pp. 1919-1924 7. M. Nuttin, H. Van Brussel: Learning the peg-into-hole assembly operation with a connectionist reinforcement technique, Comput. Ind. 33(1), 101-109 (1997)