Robot Physical Interaction: Passivity-Based Planning and Control

This book presents a unified passivity-based framework for robot physical interaction, addressing the simultaneous control of force and motion, reactive policy design for human-robot scenarios, and energy-based modeling and monitoring. Rather than offering task-specific solutions, it develops a modular architecture grounded in physical principles, enabling robust and generalizable interaction control across diverse real-world settings.Applications range from industrial manipulation and multi-manual object handling to ergonomic haptic guidance and support-adaptive robot-aided rehabilitation. The latter has been translated into a CE-certified system used in clinical settings worldwide and recognized with the 2021 euRobotics Technology Transfer Award.The book is intended for researchers and graduate students in robotics, control theory, and human-robot interaction. It provides both rigorous theoretical foundations and practical examples, while offering an interpretable basis for future integration with data-driven and learning-based methods.