Real-Time Identification of Hunt–Crossley Dynamic Models of Contact Environments

Real-time estimates of environment dynamics play an important role in the design of controllers for stable interaction between robotic manipulators and unknown environments. The Hunt–Crossley (HC) dynamic contact model has been shown to be more consistent with the physics of contact, compared with the classical linear models, such as Kelvin–Voigt (KV). This paper experimentally evaluates the author’s previously proposed single-stage identification method for real-time parameter estimation of HC nonlinear dynamic models. Experiments are performed on various dynamically distinct objects, including an elastic rubber ball, a piece of sponge, a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) phantom, and a PVC phantom with a hard inclusion. A set of mild conditions for guaranteed unbiased estimation of the proposed method is discussed and experimentally evaluated. Furthermore, this paper rigorously evaluates the performance of the proposed single-stage method and compares it with those of a double-stage method for the HC model and a recursive least squares method for the KV model and its variations in terms of convergence rate, the sensitivity to parameter initialization, and the sensitivity to the changes in environment dynamic properties.