A Unifying Object-oriented Methodology to Consolidate Multibody Dynamics Computations in Robot Control

Abstract

Modern software-based robot control systems are built upon control schemes relying on descriptions of the robot's dynamical motion. This work develops a general purpose methodology to support the robot control design engineer in the whole modeling process. This comprises robot model specification, automatical generation or manual coding of executable multibody dynamics algorithms and integration of these operational robot models in an evolving robot control software architecture. A new object-oriented paradigm for the precise description of the mechanical robot components and the desired computations, a new extension of the mathematical framework of spatial operators for derivtion of dynamics algorithms and a dataflow-driven model of computation form the basis of a new object-oriented class hierarchy to consolidate all required model computations. Examples of real-world industrial and scientific control applications, e.g., path planning, calibration, and trajectory optimization, motivate the range of possible applications.