Proceedings of the 37th Chinese Control Conference

July 25-27, 2018, Wuhan, China

Adaptive Impedance Control Method for Industrial Manipulator Writing

Based on Kalman Filter
Qidan Zhu1, Xinru Xie1, Chao Li1, Guihua Xia1
1. College of Automation, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
E-mail: xiexinru@hrbeu.edu.cn

Abstract: This paper presents an adaptive impedance control method based on Kalman filter to write Chinese characters for
industrial manipulator. Kalman filter is used to estimate the actual contact force. For safety, the contact force is controlled to
maintain constant using the adaptive impedance control method. There is no need for the knowledge of the environment. A robot
Chinese characters writing system is designed to write characters on a stiff board. The writing experiment results verified the
performance of the proposed method, and the trajectory and force can be tracked simultaneously.
Key Words: characters writing, adaptive impedance control, Kalman filter, industrial manipulator

method, such as hybrid position/force control [7] or

1 Introduction
Manipulators have been used in many fields to accomplish
repetitive or dangerous tasks. With the increase of
applications in unstructured environment, robots are
required to interact with the environment autonomously.
Handwriting is a typical human motion [1], and it is a highly
complex and challenging task that need to contact with the
environment. Consequently, writing characters on a stiff
board, especially for Chinese characters, is a challenging
task for robots, because the safe contact force should be
considered.
Recently, many studies have been focused on robot
writing. Xiaobo Gong [2] realized drawing the Chinese
characters on a given sphere based on continuous path
control. Guohua Gao [3] developed a kind of writing
function of 4-DOF binocular vision manipulator with
flexible algorithm, and it allows a common robot to write at
high accuracy. Fei Chao [1] introduced a robot writing
approach through human-robot interactions. Chinese
character’s strokes are extracted from the captured human
demonstrator’s arm trajectories. Chenguang Yang [4]
presented a control method on the Baxter robot to imitate
human writing skills using electromyography(EMG) signals
successfully. Peidong Liang [5] used surface EMG (sEMG)
for writing skill, the joint stiffness extracted from sEMG
signals is transferred to the robot to complete writing tasks.
Rongchuan YU [6] designed a writing robot control system
based on the CoreXY structure, and the jitter problem was
solved using the improved genetic algorithm.
All studies mentioned above made great contributions for
robot writing. However, the contact force between the
end-effectror(EE), i.e. the pencil, and the environment has
not been considered. If the robot writes on a stiff board, the
contact force should be controlled within a proper range to
guarantee the safety. It is challenging for characters writing
task to follow a desired trajectory while keeping a constant
force with the environment. Therefore, compliant control
*This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of
China and the China Academy of Engineering Physics(NSAF) under Grant
No.U1530119, and Discipline Construction Comprehensive Pilot Special
Funding of College of Automation of Harbin Engineering University.
impedance control [8], is needed to accomplish these tasks.
The contact force between the EE of the robot and
environment is measured using a Force/Torque (F/T) sensor,
which is attached to the robot wrist. Usually, the measured
values of the F/T sensor are not the actual contact force and
torque. Besides, in the industrial environment, the signals
sampled directly from the F/T sensor always contain strong
noises, such as thermal noise, environment noise and so on,
which degrade the performance of the force control. The
Kalman filter algorithm [7] could be used to estimate the
actual contact force and torque. Liping YAN [9] present a
linear transformation to decouple the cross-correlated sensor
noises into cross-independent and established new
measurement models.
Actually, the position and the stiffness of the environment
are usually unknown, and they have influence on the control
performance. Many control method are studied to adapt the
uncertain contact environment, such as neural network based
force control [10], sliding mode hybrid impedance control
[11], adaptive impedance control [12, 13], robust impedance
control [14], adaptive neural impedance control [15, 16],
observer-based impedance control [17].
In this paper, we present an adaptive impedance control
method based on Kalman filter to write the Chinese
characters using the 6-DOF industrial manipulator. The
Kalman filter is applied to estimate the actual contract force.
The adaptive impedance control is robust to disturbances
and impact forces. There is no need for the environment
knowledge, the presented method could track the outline of
the Chinese characters accurately and control the contact
force safely. The experiments of writing the Chinese
characters on a stiff board verified the performance of the
proposed method. This method could be applied to
accomplish other interaction tasks that need tracking the
trajectory and controlling force simultaneously.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 estimates the
actual contact force between the robot EE and the
environment using Kalman filter algorithm. Section 3
reviews the conventional impedance control model, and
analyzes the steady state error. An adaptive impedance
conrol scheme based Kalman filter is developed. The
Chinese characters writing process of robot is introduced in

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Section 4. Robot writing experiments are designed in Section y(t ) H 0 x(t )  D0 gˈ (7)
5 to verify the proposed method. At last, conclusion is made where, A0 , D0 , H 0 are given by:
in Section 6.
ª012u12 I12u12 º ª 06u3 º ª  I 3u3 º
2 Contact Force Estimation Based on Kalman A0 «0 » , D0 « E » , E6u3 m « S (r ) » ,
¬ 12u12 012u12 ¼ ¬ 6u3 ¼ ¬ CE ¼
Filter
ª I 6u6 06u18 º ª I 3u3 03u3 º
H0 «C », C « S (r )  S (r ) I » .
2.1 Contact Force Modeling ¬ 6u6 06u18 ¼ ¬ CS CE 3u3 ¼

The typical way to measure the contact force between the 2.2 Kalman Filter
EE of the robot and the environment is using a F/T sensor
which is located at the wrist of robot. The ideal measured The forces and torques measured by the F/T sensor usually
force and torque can be written as: contain much noise, and these noises have a great influence
on the control accuracy. The Kalman filter algorithom is
ª FS º ª FE º ª FI º ª FG º
«M » «M »  «M »  «M » , (1) used in this paper to obtain the accurate contact forces.
¬ S¼ ¬ E¼ ¬ I¼ ¬ G¼ The noise is supposed to be white gaussian noises. The
where FS , M S are the measured values of the F/T sensor, system model and measurement model can be given
which are constituted by the contact force FE and torque according to (8), (9):
x(t ) A0 x(t )  wxˈ
x( (8)
M E , the inertial force FI and torque M I , and the gravity
y(t ) H 0 x(t )  D0 g  vy , (9)
FG and gravitational torque M G .
where, wx , v y are system noise and measurement noise
If the manipulator moves smoothly and slowly, the
influence of the inertial force on the measured values of the respectively.
F/T sensor can be neglected. In this case, the measured The state difference equation of the system and
values are only related to the gravity and contact force. As measurement difference equation can be obtained by
shown in Fig. 1, the mass center of the tool is set at Point C, discretizing the continuous system :
and the coordinate frame is established with the origin at C. E xk Axk 1  wk 1 , (10)
is the contact point between the EE and the environment. yk Hxk  Dg  vkˈ (11)
Similarly, the coordinate frame of E is set as 6 E . S is the
ª I12u12 I12u12 º
mass center of the F/T sensor. The frame of F/T sensor is 6 S . where, A «0 » , H H 0 , D D0 .
¬ 12u12 I12u12 ¼
Take 6C as the reference coordinate frame, the acceleration
The Kalman filter is used to estimate the optimization
and angular acceleration of EE are ignored. We can get the output of the system. The covariance of system noise and
Newton-Euler equation of the system: measurement noise are set as Q and R respectively. The state
FEC FSC  mg C , (2) xˆ k |k 1 and the covariance Pk|k 1 at time step k based on the
M EC C
S (rCS ) FSC  M SC  S (rCE
C
) FEC , (3) result at time step k  1 can be calculated firstly:
xˆ k |k 1 Axˆk 1 ,
C
whereˈ m is the mass of the tool, g is the gravitational
(12)
acceleration vector, S (a) is the skew-symmetry operator Pk|k 1 APk 1 AT  Q.
applied to vector a .
Then the Kalman gain K k and the optimal estamation at
time step k are calculate:
Kk Pk|k 1 H T ( HPk|k 1 H  R)1 , (13)
xˆk xˆk|k 1  Kk ( yk  Hxˆk|k 1 ). (14)
The covariance Pk is updated at last˖
Pk ( I  Kk H ) Pk|k 1. (15)
The actual contact force FE and torque M E between the
EE and the environment can be obtained from the estimated
state vector.
Fig. 1: Diagram of force and torque. 3 Position-based Adaptive Impedance Control

Define the state vector x  24

and measurement vector 3.1 Impedance Control Model
y  12 :
The spring-mass-damping model can be used in the
x [ FST M ST FET M ET FST M ST FET M ET ]T , (4) impedance system, and the ideal impedance control model
y [ FST M ST FET M ET ]T . (5) is:
The system model and measurement model can be d  Bd X dc
M d X dc d  K d X dc E, (16)
established based on (2), (3): where, M d , Bd and K d represent target inertia, damping
x(
x(t ) A0 x(t ), (6) and stiffness matrix of the impedance model, respectively;

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X dc X d  X c are the difference between the desired Thus, even though the position error 'xe is very small,
position and actual positon; X ddc and X ddc are the velocity the steady state error of the contact force ess could be large
and acceleration respectively cooresponding to due to the large environment stiffness.
X dc ; E =Fd  Fc are the difference between the desired 3.3 Adaptive Impedance Control
contact force and actual contact force.
For simplicity, one dimensional case is only considered. The typical industrial manipulator can be controlled using
The impedance control model is showed in Fig. 2. The position control mode and velocity control mode, while the
impedance control model (16) is simplified as: joint torque of robot can’t be controlled directly. Therefore,
md xdc  bd xdc position-based impedance control method is developed in
d  kd xdc d e. (17)
this paper to control the robot position and contact force.
The environment model can be approximated to The position-based impedance control method consists of
“spring-damping” system [18]: an inner position control loop and an outer indirect force
be ( x  xe )  ke ( x  xe ) f ˈ (18) control loop [19]. In the inner position control loop, the
where, be and ke are the target damping and stiffness of manipulator can be controlled to reach the desired position
environment respectively; x is the actual position of the EE through the joint controller. The position control accuracy of
and xe is the position of the contact surface; and f is the industrial robot are usually very high. Besides, the error of
the contact force is transformed into position correction
actual contact force.
though the impedance controller in the outer control loop.
In free space, the robot does not contact with the
environment, and the outer force control loop should not be
necessary. In this phase, Fd Fc 0 , X c X d . In
constrained space, the nonzero position output from
impedance controller modifies the desired position X d to
achieve force tracking and position tracking. And the robot is
controlled to track the modified desired trajectory through
the inner position control loop.
As described in 3.2, the unknown environment parameters
would have a great influence on the control accuracy.
Besides, the environmental is usually unstructured and
Fig. 2: The impedance model of the EE. unpredictable, the impedance control with constant
3.2 Analysis of Steady State Error parameters can’t be adjusted as the environment changes. If
the impedance control parameters are adjusted automatically
When the pencil, which attached to the EE, contact with according to the environemnt, the robustness could be
environment steadily and the system is in steady state, the guaranteed. We present an adaptive impedace control
impedance control model (17) can be simplified as: method to improve the control accuracy and robustness.
e f d  fc kd ( xd  xc ), (19) In the adaptive impedance control scheme, the parameters
where, xc is the actual position of the pencil. of impedance controller are corrected by adaptive control
law, see Fig. 3.
The environment model can be written as:
fc ke ( xc  xe ). (20)
According to (19) and (20), the force tracking error can be
given as:
kd
ess ( f d  ke xe  ke xd ). (21)
k d  ke
If the steady state error of the contact force is zero, the
desired position xd is: Fig. 3: Scheme of position based adaptive impedance control.
f
xd xe  d . (22) The main idea of this method is generating disired position
ke
xd according to force tracking error e and its derivative e .
It is observed that if the actual contact force is exepected
The adaptive law is:
to realize zero-error tracking, xd should be calculated based
xd (t ) f (t )  k p (t )e(t )  kd (t )e(t ), (24)
on environment parameters xe and ke . In reality, xe is
where, f (t ) is a time-varying parameter which is equivalent
unknown, and ke is varying. The errors of environment
to integral term; k p (t ) and kd (t ) are proportional and
parameters are defined as 'xe and 'ke , respectively. The
integral gain, respectively.
steady state error of contact force is:
In the adapative law, ee((t ) can be replaced by xx((t ) :
kd 'k
ess ( e f d  ke ˜ 'xe  'ke ˜ 'xe ) (23) xd (t ) f (t )  k p (t )e(t )  kd (t ) x(t ), (25)
kd  (ke  'ke ) ke
where x(
x(t ) is the actual velocity of the robot.

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 Here, the adaptive control law is similar to the PI 5. Track the desired trajectory, and control the
controller. In order to ensure the stability of the whole manipulator using the joint position controller.
system, constants V are used to correct the control law. The
items in adaptive control law (25) are:
t t
f (t ) f (0)  D1 ³ q(t )dt  D 2 q(t )  V 1 ³ f (t )dtˈ (26)
0 0
t
k p (t ) k p (0)  E1 ³ q(t )e(t )dt  E 2 q(t )e(t )
0
t
(27)
 V 2 ³ k p (t )dt ,
0
t
kv (t ) kv (0)  O1 ³ q(t ) x(t )dt  O2 q(t ) x(t )
0
t
(28) Fig. 4: The flow chart of robot writing.
 V 3 ³ kv (t )dt , 5 Experiments
0

q(t ) Z p e(t )  Zv xm (t ), (29) Chinese character writing experiments are designed to

where, Z p , Zv are coefficient of position
velocity,respectively; f (0) , k p (0) and kv (0) are initial
value; D1 , E1 and O1 are integration coefficient; D 2 , E 2
and O2 are proportionality coefficient; V 1 , V 2 and V 3 are
positive and small coefficient. And all of these coefficients
are constant.
Though regulation of adaptive control law, the tracking
error of contact force could be reduced, and the stability and
robustness could be ensured.
4 Wrting Process Using Manipulator
True Type Font (TTF) vector fonts is a text file format
developed by Apple and Microsoft In this paper,the TTF
fonts are used to get the outlines information of the Chinese
characters that to be written. The Chinese characters writing
process using manipulater is shown in Fig. 4. It can be
divided into five steps:
1. Input the Chinese characters to be written. In general, it
is more difficult to write the complicated characters than the
simple ones.
2. Set the font type, height, width and angle of the
characters. The outline information mainly refer to the pixel
positions of the outline’s key points. These information can
be directly extracted from characters outline data’s memory
structure.
3. The characters outlines in TTF fonts are divided into
straight line and quadratic spline curve. Interpolation method
can be used to make the characters more smooth and
beautiful. The parabolic interpolation method is used to fit
the quadratic spline curves.
4. Express the pixel positions in the coordinate frame of
the robot. The coordinate of EE in XY-plane can be
transformed from pixel coordinate of contour point. For each
outline, the coordinate transformation formula is:
P( x, y) R ˜ >Q1 ( x, y)  Q( x, y)@  Max( x, y), (30)
where, R is a constant transform coefficient; P( x, y) is the
desired position of EE, and Q( x, y) is the corresponding
position of pixel; Q1 ( x, y) is the pixel coordinate of the
initial point; Max( x, y) is the upper limit.
verify the control performance of the proposed method using
and
the Reinovo REbot-V-6R-6500 industrial manipulator. The
positioning accuracy of the robot is r0.08mm . The
experimental setup is showed in Fig. 5. A six-dimensional
F/T sensor Bioforcen is mounted on the wrist of the robot.
The sample frequency of the F/T informations is 5 kHz and
the accuracy of this sensor is less than 1% F.S. A pencil is
tightly fixed on the robot EE, and the stiff paperboard is
placed under the robot.
Fig. 5: The experienmental setup of robot writing.
As we all know, unlike the writing brush, the pencil is
fragile. Therefore, when writing on the stiff board, the
contact force should be controlled accurately to guarantee
the safety. Moreover, to make the characters clear and
beautiful, the contact force between the paperboard and
pencil should be appropriate. In our experimental scene, the
desired contact force is set as 6 N, and the desired positions
in XY-plane are obtained as described in Section 4. The
position and stiffness of the paperboard are unknown. The
manipulator is expected to write characters “Zu Kang” on the
paperboard while tracking the desired position and force
simultaneously. The characters are complicated enough to
verify effectiveness of the proposed method mentioned
above.
The actual writing results using the adaptive impedance
control method, are showed in Fig. 6, meetting the
requirements well. We can see that the lines of characters is
neither too light nor too heavy, and they are uniform. The

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actual trajectory tracking result is showed in Fig. 7.
Obviously, the trajectory tracking accuracy of every contour
line is high. The actual trajectory is almost coincide with the
desired trajectory.
Fig. 6: The actual writing result of robot.
Fig. 7: Result of trajectory tracking.
The force tracking result during writing is showed in Fig. 8.
The green solid line is the desired value, the blue dotted line
is the original signal sampled from the F/T sensor, and the
red solid line is the contact force estimated by Kalman filter.
In the Kalman filter, the covariance of system noise is set as
ª107
0 º
Q « 7 »
, and the convairance of measurement
¬ 0 10 ¼
noise is set as R 0.5 . Q and R would influence the
estimation result by affecting the value of Kalman gain, and
they are adjusted according to the characteristics of system
and sensor.
Due to the fact that a character consists of multiple
contour line, the force tracking path is divided into
multi-segments. At the initial stage of every segment, the
impact force between the pencil and paperboard is slightly
large due to the unknown position of the paperboard. The
contact force can be adjusted quickly using the adaptive
impadance control method, and the tracking error is within
the allowable range.
Fig. 8: Result of force tracking.
Overall, the performance of writing is intuitively showed
in Fig. 9. We can see from the results that the force is
effectively controlled, and the impact force is only appear at
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the beginning of the segments. The position-based adaptive
impedance control method is robust, and there is no need for
the knowledge of the environment, such as the surface
position and the stiffness of the board. This method is proved
to write the Chinese characters on the stiff board succesfully.
Fig. 9: T Result of force tracking and trajectory tracking.
6 Conclusion
In this paper, an adaptive impedace control method based
on Kalman filter is proposed to write Chinese characters for
industrial robot. The Kalman filter is used to estimate the
actural contact force between the EE and the environment. A
constant contact force can be tracked using the adaptive
impedance control and there is no need for the environment
parameters. The experimental results of writing on a stiff
paperboard prove that the proposed method could achieve
force control and position control steadily. This method
could be used to other complex interactive tasks in
unstructured environments. The future work will be focus on
the elimination of the impact force.
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