Context

Robots interacting with humans and their surroundings are becoming more and more present every year, and therefore, it is of utmost importance to provide them with safety features and robustness. This safety can be achieved through passive mechanisms, but these are limited in their performance. Instead, active control strategies are a more general and flexible approach that allows to better adapt the robot’s behavior to the environment and the task requirements. 

Impedance control is a common active approach that enables robots to behave in a more human-like manner by adjusting the relation between force and velocity. Variable impedance control (VIC), has thus gained popularity in dealing with the changes in the environment, the interaction with humans and the increasing complexity of tasks. Applications of VIC have shown significant improvements over previous methods in human-robot interaction, soft robotics, manipulation of deformable objects, or prosthetics control. Nevertheless, inferring a variable impedance profile in certain tasks without ad-hoc implementations can be a challenging problem, not only because of the presence of external interactions of unknown nature, but also because the robustness of the controller needs to be ensured. Latest trends in VIC also use optimal control tools such as model predictive control and data-driven machine learning techniques, to learn and implement VIC methods that can better represent and adapt to the underlying nature of a task. 

This proposal aims to be the fourth event on the topic of Variable Impedance Learning and Control. The first one was organized at IROS’18, followed by IROS’21 and RSS’22. All of them were very successful with about 90+/-20 attendees, and the format allowed for very fruitful discussions on the topic between academics and students. In this RSS'23, we propose a similar format to that of the previous edition, at RSS'22, with a combined - and interactive - format. Introducing this topic of physical interaction control to junior researchers and students in a tutorial-like way. The very basic theoretical foundations on this topic will be presented, followed by hands-on activities, as described in the next section. This half-day tutorial will give this junior audience the basic background needed to better understand the second part of the workshop, where different experts will be brought together to discuss the current challenges and perspectives of this field in robotics. The main intended audience of this second-half part of the workshop is more senior researchers and students that already work on this topic, as the talks will be more detailed and focused. Special attention was given to providing a diverse spectrum of prestigious speakers, from different seniority, gender, ethnicity, as well as geographic location, as detailed in the next sections.