Implementation of a neuromuscular-like control for compliance on a PUMA 560 robot

In comparison with robot manipulators, it is widely acknowledged that primate limbs excel robots in facile movements requiring compliance control. After certain salient properties of the neuromuscular system have been identified in our earlier works, a neuromuscular-like controller was proposed. This paper will extend our findings in modeling the biological muscle-reflex mechanism to actual applications. Experiments on a PUMA 560 robot demonstrated that the neuromuscular-like controller will reflex to any changing displacement and enhance the compliant forces for the changing motion without using a force sensor. The proposed controller can adapt to either position control or force control.