Control

Active Compliance

Active compliance is robot behavior in which software control, rather than passive mechanical elements, makes a manipulator yield in response to contact forces. It is implemented with force/torque or joint-torque feedback through schemes such as impedance and admittance control, letting a stiff mechanism emulate a spring-damper of programmable stiffness. This contrasts with passive compliance from springs, elastomers, or series elastic actuators, which reacts instantly but cannot be reprogrammed.

Why it matters for physical AI

Contact-rich tasks like insertion, wiping, and handovers require yielding to unmodeled contact, and actively compliant control gives learned policies a forgiving action interface that absorbs their prediction errors safely.