Proper Virtual LabVIEW™ Instrumentation Library for the Assisted Research in Robotics

Abstract

The paper contents the LabVIEW library with instruments designed for the theoretical and experimental assisted research in Robotics. The library have more than 350 virtual instrumentation for the assisted kinematics, dynamics for the assisted structural design of some more important types of robots, for the animation of the movements of all robot's bodies. The created library will be used also for the animation of the robots in complex applications like serial, parallel, mixt configuration and also for the animation of the parallel structures. All mathematical models are in the matrix form and assure easily to obtain the information about the positions, angular and linear velocities in dual vectors form, linear and angular accelerations in dual vectors form, 6x6 matrix form for the forces- moments in all robot's joints. The designed library can be used in all analyze of the robots structures because it is general, with the possibility to combine many LabVIEW icons to obtain other instrumentation. One important part of this library is dedicated for the assisted research with data acquisition by using the specific data acquisition board from National Instruments for the assisted research of the dynamic behavior parameters and also for controlling, in a automation cycle, one didactical arm type robot with DC encoder motors and Geko drive controlling board. The presented methodology and the virtual instrumentation can be applied in all types of the robot's structures.