Method for manually adjusting the pose of a manipulator arm of an industrial robot and industrial robots

An industrial robot having a robot control that is designed and configured to carry out a robot program, and also having a manipulator arm with at least three joints that can be automatically moved according to the robot program and/or can be automatically moved in a hand-guided operation mode, wherein the robot control is designed and configured to:

• detect a guidance force applied to the manipulator arm by an operator of the industrial robot;
• determine a selected direction of motion from the available degrees of freedom in a reference coordinate system which corresponds to the direction in which the guidance force has its greatest force vector component;
• and
• control the drives of the industrial robot using force control in such a manner that a pre-specified reference point associated with the manipulator arm is moved only in the selected freedom direction as a result of movement of the manipulator arm by an operator during a manually-guided adjustment of the pose of the manipulator arm.