This thesis describes a dynamics simulation system of robot arms. The simulation system is designed to gain a physical understanding of the dynamic characteristics of robot arms and actuators and to implement and evaluate various robot control algorithms.
In this thesis, the kinematics, the dynamics, the control, and the trajectory planning of the robot system are considered. The inverse kinematics problems are solved by a geometric approach. In the dynamics problems, the mechanical dynamics, the actuator dynamics, and the effect of friction as well as are considered.
As basic control algorithms PD control and Computed torque control algorithms are used and different control algorithms can be implemented and evaluated without difficulty since the simulation program has a modular structure.
In the trajectory planning, the algorithms to compute the effective trajectories of straight line and smooth transient motions are proposed and developed.
To evaluate the total dynamics simulation system, a PUMA-like robot arm and a Stanford-like robot arm were considered. The host computer is a MV/10000 mini computer and a IBM/PC personal computer is used to display the various output data of the simulation. The software is developed in PASCAL language and assembly language. A serial interface is used for the data communication between the two computers.
