Control

Impedance Control

Impedance control is a control strategy, introduced by Neville Hogan in 1985, that regulates the dynamic relationship between a robot's motion and interaction forces, making the end-effector or joints behave like a programmable mass-spring-damper system. Rather than tracking positions or forces exactly, the robot yields predictably to contact, with stiffness and damping parameters tuned per task or per direction.

Why it matters for physical AI

Compliant behavior under contact is fundamental to safe operation around humans and to contact-rich skills, and learned policies increasingly output impedance targets rather than raw positions for robustness.