A Comparison of Control Strategies for Collaborative Mobile Robots

Mobile collaborative robots are more and more common in the industrial scenario, increasing the workspace of collaborative manipulators and, thus the shared workspace. This work compares different admittance controllers for mobile collaborative robots. In particular, we focused on an application where a human operator manually moves a mobile collaborative robot by applying forces to a collaborative manipulator attached to the mobile platform. Three different forms of admittance control were presented and tested with experiments on a real mobile robot. Finally, the capabilities of these controllers were compared.