Compliance synthesis for force guided assembly

In robotic assembly operations the robot comes in contact with the environment and some form of compliance is typically used to prevent excessive contact forces. These contact forces provide information about the contact geometry and can be used to guide the assembly operation. Thus, compliance can be thought of as a task-dependent mapping from sensed forces to corrective motions which bring the robot closer to its goal. In this work we describe a methodology for the automated synthesis and verification of this mapping. The possible erroneous configurations of the robot are computed via Monte-Carlo simulation of the task execution. The static contact force at each erroneous contact configuration is computed and a corrective motion is computed and mapped to the force. The validity of the mapping is also checked to ensure that the sensed forces will provide unambiguous information during the actual execution of the planned compliant motion. Simulation and experimental results are also presented.