Development of a CAD Based Platform for Scorbot-ER Vu Industrial Robot Manipulator

Abstract

Robots are required to operate at different environmental conditions facing varieties of end-effector to workspace interactions. During design stage, designer needs to verify the robots performance on various test conditions. Physical prototyping although is more desirable, may prove to be expensive and time consuming. Virtual prototyping can be used especially in the conceptual design stage in order to reduce the amount of physical testing that is required. Virtual prototyping of robots dynamic is one of the interesting fields where in the present day tools are used to simulate mechanical systems as a multi-body system with two or more rigid bodies imperfectly joined together having the possibility of relative moment between them. This paper discusses the application of Virtual Prototyping using CAD based software for SCORBOT-ER Vu robot. It is a 5-DOF of vertical articulated robot and all the joints are revolute. Initially, robot manipulator parametric solid models was created in Pro/ENGINEER (Pro/E), Pro/Mechanica was used to simulate the dynamic simulation and working space. Finally the program was tested in the real world, using the real robot.