CINEGEN : A RAPID PROTOTYPING TOOL FOR ROBOT MANIPULATORS Lorenzo

CINEGEN is a Virtual Reality based system for the rapid design, prototyping and simulation of robot manipula-tors. With CINEGEN, users provide a text description of a manipulator and a numerical algorithm automatically computes the inverse kinematics. This algorithm is capable of handling serial, parallel and hybrid manipulator structures. Using CINEGEN, the user can directly interact with a graphical manipulator: he can define tasks in Cartesian space and the program generates real time inverse kine-matics to show the behaviour of the robot. Graphical information representing internal parameters (speeds, torques, accelerations) help the user to understand robot problems and optimise the design. Additionally, to enhance the intuitive interaction with the software interface, a new type of 3D mechanical device with force feedback is being developed. This interface is currently being used by EPFL-ISR (Lausanne, Switzerland) and NASA Ames (Moffet Field, California) to control several manipulators as well as to prototype new designs. INTRODUCTION This paper describes an innovative user interface for high-level control of robot manipulators. This interface is based on Virtual Reality which allows the user to interact in an intuitive way with the robot. The core of the program is a generic kinematic generator which provides real time kinematics of any robot manipulator. We first present the method to achieve real time simulation of articulated structures. Then we show what func-tionality the interface provides to the user. We conclude by presenting some examples to illustrate the results already obtained.