Virtual Robot Simulation in RoboAnalyzer

Robotics is an important area not only in research and development but also from the perspective of industrial automation. As a result, increasing number of fundamental and advanced level robotics courses are being introduced in the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula, particularly in Mechanical and Electrical engineering streams. Robot kinematics is the cornerstone of such courses and it is equally challenging for teachers to teach as well as students to learn, as the concepts such as Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameters, robot kinematic and dynamic analyses, trajectory planning, etc. are difficult to understand. Various robotics learning software and tools have been developed by researchers around the world. One such attempt is made here to develop software called RoboAnalyzer. It can show animated DH parameters and performs forward and inverse kinematics, and dynamic analyses on serial robots. In this paper, a new module named “Virtual Robot Module” is reported which consists of 17 CAD models of commercially available industrial robots. Joint-level and Cartesian-level jogging can be performed on these robots. Relative and absolute motion of the endeffector can be achieved in the Cartesian space by controlling the position as well as the orientation of the endeffector. RoboAnalyzer software is freely available for academic purposes from http://www.roboanalyzer.com, and can be used by teachers and students almost instantly. It has a very easy to use interface and lets the user start learning the robotics concepts directly rather than learning CAD modeling, assembly modeling and then simulate a robot, as done using any commercial CAD software such as ADAMS, RecurDyn, Autodesk Inventor, etc. Keywords—Robot simulation, Robotics Learning Software, Cartesian motion planning, Jacobian control