The stability investigation of variable viscosity control in the human‐robot interaction

BACKGROUND: For many co‐manipulative applications, variable damping is a valuable feature provided by robots. One approach is implementing a high viscosity at low velocities and a low viscosity at high velocities. This, however, is proven to have the possibility to alter human natural motion performance. METHODS: We show that the distortion is caused by the viscosity drop resulting in robot's resistance to motion. To address this, a method for stably achieving the desired behaviour is presented. It involves leveraging a first‐order linear filter to slow the viscosity variation down. RESULTS: The proposition is supported by a theoretical analysis using a robotic model. Meanwhile, the user performance in human‐robot experiments gets significantly improved, showing the practical efficiency in real applications. CONCLUSIONS: This paper discusses the variable viscosity control in the context of co‐manipulation. An instability problem and its solution were theoretically shown and experimentally evidenced through human‐robot experiments.