Joint stiffness estimation based on force sensor measurements in industrial manipulators

The problem of estimating the stiffness constants of the joints in industrial manipulators is addressed in this paper. It is shown that the model of the robot constrained by a rigid environment yields a simple relationship between variations of the motor coordinates and the forces arising at the contact with the environment. By exploiting the measurements of the motor positions sensors and of a force sensor located at the end effector a method is proposed to simply compute good estimates of the stiffness constants. Experiments have been made on the industrial robot SMART and the results are given and discussed