Neural Networks Enhanced Optimal Admittance Control of Robot-Environment Interaction Using Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, an adaptive admittance control scheme is developed for robots to interact with time-varying environments. Admittance control is adopted to achieve a compliant physical robot-environment interaction, and the uncertain environment with time-varying dynamics is defined as a linear system. A critic learning method is used to obtain the desired admittance parameters based on the cost function composed of interaction force and trajectory tracking without the knowledge of the environmental dynamics. To deal with dynamic uncertainties in the control system, a neural-network (NN)-based adaptive controller with a dynamic learning framework is developed to guarantee the trajectory tracking performance. Experiments are conducted and the results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.