# Convex Controller Synthesis for Robot Contact

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04313 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04313/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Fine Robotic Manipulation without Force/Torque Sensor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13413/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Controlling contacts is truly challenging, and this has been a major hurdle to deploying industrial robots into unstructured/human-centric environments. More specifically, the main challenges are: (i) how to ensure stability at all times; (ii) how to satisfy task-specific performance specifications; (iii) how to achieve (i) and (ii) under environment uncertainty, robot parameters uncertainty, sensor and actuator time delays, external perturbations, etc. Here, we propose a new approach -- Convex Controller Synthesis (CCS) -- to tackle the above challenges based on robust control theory and convex optimization. In two physical interaction tasks -- robot hand guiding and sliding on surfaces with different and unknown stiffnesses -- we show that CCS controllers outperform their classical counterparts in an essential way.