Whole-Body Control of a Mobile Manipulator for Passive Collaborative Transportation

Human-robot collaborative tasks foresee interactions between humans and robots with various degrees of complexity. Specifically, for tasks which involve physical contact among the agents, challenges arise in the modelling and control of such interaction. In this paper we propose a control architecture capable of ensuring a flexible and robustly stable physical human-robot interaction, focusing on a collaborative transportation task. The architecture is deployed onto a mobile manipulator, modelled as a whole-body structure, which aids the operator during the transportation of an unwieldy load. Thanks to passivity techniques, the controller adapts its interaction parameters online while preserving robust stability for the overall system, thus experimentally validating the architecture