Impedance Control

Ask about this topic

Overview

Impedance control shapes how a robot responds to motion errors and contact forces, letting it be stiff for accurate motion or compliant for safer interaction. Methods include fixed or variable stiffness and damping, impedance and admittance control, passivity and barrier-function safety filters, and model-predictive control; newer policies also learn compliance from demonstrations or adapt it using vision and force cues. Researchers evaluate these methods in tasks such as peg insertion, wiping, teleoperation, legged locomotion, and rehabilitation, measuring task success, tracking error, contact force, and stability. A central challenge is balancing accurate, efficient motion with safe compliance while ensuring that changing gains remain stable and physically achievable under uncertain contact, robot dynamics, and communication delays.

Latest papers

CardsList

44 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, up 83% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Intention assimilation control for accurate tracking with variable impedance in teleoperation

    May 7, 2026Atsushi Takagi, Yanan Li, Hiroaki Gomi +1Robot Trajectory TrackingRobot Teleoperation

  2. False Feasibility in Variable Impedance MPC for Legged Locomotion

    Apr 24, 2026Vishal RameshImpedance ControlModel Predictive Control

  3. Passive Variable Impedance For Shared Control

    Apr 22, 2026Maximilian Mühlbauer, Nepomuk Werner, Ribin Balachandran +4Impedance ControlFeedback Control

    School of Computation, Information and Technology, Sensor Based Robotic Systems and Intelligent Assistance Systems, Technical University Munich, Friedrich-Ludwig-Bauer-Str. 3, Garching, Germany. · German Aerospace Center (DLR), Robotics and Mechatronics Center (RMC), Münchener Str. 20, 82234 Weßling, Germany.

  4. GenerativeMPC: VLM-RAG-guided Whole-Body MPC with Virtual Impedance for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation

    Apr 21, 2026Marcelino Julio Fernando, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Jeffrin Sam +3Mobile ManipulationBimanual Robotic Manipulation

    Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia

  5. Robust Adaptive Backstepping Impedance Control of Robots in Unknown Environments

    Apr 10, 2026Reza Nazmara, Alap Kshirsagar, Jan Peters +1Backstepping ControlImpedance Control

    Research Center for Systems and Technologies (SYSTEC), ARISE, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal. · Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab, Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, Germany.

  6. A Unified Multi-Layer Framework for Skill Acquisition from Imperfect Human Demonstrations

    Apr 9, 2026Zi-Qi Yang, Mehrdad R. KermaniCompliant Robot ControlRobot Skill Learning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Western University, London, ON N6A 5B9, Canada.

  7. Visualizing Impedance Control in Augmented Reality for Teleoperation: Design and User Evaluation

    Mar 26, 2026Gijs van den Brandt, Femke van Beek, Elena TortaBimanual Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

  8. Stiffness Copilot: An Impedance Policy for Contact-Rich Teleoperation

    Mar 14, 2026Yeping Wang, Zhengtong Xu, Pornthep Preechayasomboon +4Robot TeleoperationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    All authors are with Meta Reality Labs Research · Yeping Wang is with University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA · Zhengtong Xu is with Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

  9. Adaptive Manipulation Potential and Haptic Estimation for Tool-Mediated Interaction

    Mar 11, 2026Lin Yang, Anirvan Dutta, Yuan Ji +5Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationRobotic Tool Use

    authors are with the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. · authors are with the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, SW7 2AZ London, U.K

  10. ImpedanceDiffusion: Diffusion-Based Global Path Planning for UAV Swarm Navigation with Generative Impedance Control

    Mar 10, 2026Faryal Batool, Yasheerah Yaqoot, Muhammad Ahsan Mustafa +3Aerial RoboticsSwarm Robotics

    Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Center for Digital Engineering, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia.

  11. Passive Phase-Oriented Impedance Shaping for Rapid Acceleration in Soft Robotic Swimmers

    Mar 3, 2026Qimin Feng, Orion A. Roberts, Qiang ZhongRobot LocomotionUnderwater Robotics

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA.

  12. TDC: Sim-to-Real Transferable Directional Compliance for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Feb 15, 2026Yifei Yang, Anzhe Chen, Zhenjie Zhu +6Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationSim-to-Real Transfer

    Zhejiang University · Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center

  13. OmniVIC: A Self-Improving Variable Impedance Controller with Vision-Language In-Context Learning for Safe Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 20, 2025Heng Zhang, Wei-Hsing Huang, Gokhan Solak +1Safe Robot ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

    Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy. · Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA.

  14. SPARC: Spine with Prismatic And Revolute Compliance for Faster Quadrupedal Bounding

    Oct 2, 2025Yue Wang, Yanran XuLegged RoboticsImpedance Control

    School of Electronic and Computer Science, University of Southampton, United Kingdom