• soft robotics
• assembly
• vsa
• stiffness selection
• optimal stiffness
• stiffness optimization
• peg-in-hole

The peg in hole problem has been heavily studied in literature as a simple model to analyze assembly scenarios. Due to advances in robotic hardware and research on robots which are safe to humans, many of the models and simplifications present in literature don't apply anymore or present poor approximations for modern robots with impedance controllers. In the following work the problem of a peg-in-hole insertion with a impedance controlled robot will be tackled, and simple rules to choose optimal cartesian stiffnesses are presented. The same rules are then applied to solve the problem of optimizing stiffnesses for a VSA robot, where a desired cartesian stiffness cannot generally be obtained. A method to chose weights for the simple weighted minimization of the distance between the desired and obtained cartesian stiffnesses is then proposed, and the results of both approaches are compared by using a robot with deboupled joint stiffness control. Lastly, results of a bimanual insertion using a real VSA robot are proposed.