Historical perspective of hybrid control in robotics: beginnings, evolution, criticism and trends

Abstract

At the beginning of the last decade one very popular approach to the contact tasks of position/force robot control appeared. Judging from its formulation in the first papers, the concept of hybrid control being a very simple and intuitively clear method seemed to offer a possibility of practical use and, for these reasons, it was adopted by many researchers. However, due to lack of a consistent hybrid control theory, some researchers have criticised the concept. In order to present a synthetic and more objective judgement of hybrid control, this paper provides a survey of its beginnings and evolution, with particular retrospection of its evaluations by some authors. Having in mind the present state concerning the position/force control, a new method is mentioned in this paper, in order to provide adequate formulation and correct solution of the control of robot interacting with dynamic environment.