State Machine-Based Hybrid Position/Force Control Architecture for a Waste Management Mobile Robot with 5DOF Manipulator

When robots are built with state-driven motors, task-planning increases in complexity and difficulty. This type of actuator is difficult to control, because each type of control position/force requires different motor parameters. To solve this problem, we propose a state machine-driven hybrid position/force control architecture (SmHPFC). To achieve this, we take the classic hybrid position/force control method, while using only PID regulators, and add a state machine on top of it. In this way, the regulators will not help the control architecture, but the architecture will help the entire control system. The architecture acts both as a parameter update process and as a switching mechanism for the joints’ decision S-matrix. The obtained control architecture was then applied to a 5DOF serial manipulator built with Festo motors. Using SmHPFC, the robot was then able to operate with position or force control depending on its designated task. Without the proposed architecture, the robot joint parameters would have to be updated using a more rigid approach; each time a new task begins with new parameters, the control type would have to be changed. Using the SmHPFC, the robot reference generation and task complexity is reduced to a much simpler one.