The paper deals with contact force estimation for robotic manipulators in Cartesian space. Such Cartesian contact force estimation (CCFE) schemes enable force-controlled robotic applications as well as collision detection without additional sensing. To this end, the paper provides a new interpretation of existing CCFE schemes based on the generalized momentum of a robotic manipulator. The main contribution is to show that these approaches can be regarded as a special case of recent results on fault isolation observers (FIOs). It is shown that this new interpretation gives rise to additional degrees of freedom in the design. While one approach exploiting these additional degrees of freedom to increase robustness is discussed, the main purpose of the paper is to build a bridge between robotics and fault diagnosis communities and to motivate the application of other fault isolation schemes to the challenging and practically relevant problem of CCFE.
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