Kinematic and Dynamic Analysis and Design Toolbox of High-DOF Hybrid Multibody Systems

Abstract

The kinematic and dynamic analysis of the high-degree of freedom (dof) hybrid systems that using serial and parallel robots together on fixed or mobile platform such as legged robots and service robots, is a rather difficult and complex, time consuming problem and a topic of great interest for researchers. There are many educational and commercial toolboxes which analyze serial and parallel robots separately. With the toolbox developed here, high-dof serial, parallel and hybrid robotics systems used on both fixed and mobile platforms can be designed and studied easily. Forward and inverse kinematics, Jacobian matrix, singularities, trajectory planning, torques and forces in joint and operational space can be examined with different robot designs. Using the toolbox that proposed in this paper, robot designer, researchers, students and educators can easily develop their own robotics systems and visualize them in the virtual reality environment provided by MATLAB. Also, it helps understanding fundamentals of high-dof multi-body hybrid robotics systems through user friendly interactive simulation. The most of existing toolboxes in the literature allow only user to analyze the predefined robots in their library with limited interactive capabilities. In some of them, the user can define a new robot with limited dof. But, the user must already have a prior knowledge about designing process of robots. In the proposed toolbox, designing and defining any new robotics systems become very easy. What makes this toolbox unique compared with the existing toolboxes is that any type of robot structures with high dof can be developed, analyzed and studied in detail.