Kinesthetic Teaching of Position-Controlled Robot Manipulators Using Disturbance Observer

Manufacturing robots very often require reprogramming tasks due to the frequent change in the production process. Kinesthetic teaching is one of the efficient ways to re-programming the task for robots. In this paper, the interaction is estimated by the disturbance observer based on the position controllers at each joint without additional sensors. Then, the compliant motion is created in the direction of the observed disturbance. The experiment demonstrates the capability of kinesthetic teaching through the physical guidance.