High performance force control - A new approach and suggested benchmark tests

This paper is a report about the testing and evaluation of a special force control scheme for standard industrial robots. The working principle of the new force control scheme is described, and quantitative test results are presented. It was the authors’ intention to compare the results with those from other research groups, but this was not possible because of two main reasons: Firstly it turned out that only very few quantitative results about robot force control have been published, and secondly it became clear that the robotics community has not yet developed suitable benchmark tests for the assessment of a robot's force control capabilities and quality. In order to initiate a discussion and further activities in this area, a set of proposed benchmark tests is described in this paper. The usefulness of the benchmark tests is illustrated with some examples.