A systematic error analysis of robotic manipulators: application to a high performance medical robot

Abstract

A systematic methodology to calculate the end-effector position and orientation errors of a robotic manipulator is presented. The method treats the physical error sources in a unified manner during the system's design so that the effect they have on the end-effector positioning accuracy can be compared and the dominant sources identified. Based on this methodology, a computer program has been developed that can perform the error analysis on any serial link manipulator. This methodology and the software are applied here to the error analysis of a six degree of freedom high performance medical manipulator, for positioning in proton therapy.