Dynamics simulation toolbox for industrial robot manipulators

A new robot toolbox for dynamics simulation based on MATLAB Graphical User Interface (GUI) is developed for educational purposes. It is built on the previous version named as ROBOLAB performing only the kinematics analysis of robot manipulators. The toolbox presented in this paper provides interactive real-time simulation and visualization of the industrial robot manipulator’s dynamics based on Langrange Euler and Newton Euler formulations. Since most of the industrial robot manipulators are produced with six degrees of freedom (DOF) such as the PUMA 560, the Fanuc ArcMate 120iB and Stanford Arm, the library of the toolbox includes sixteen fundamental 6-DOF robot manipulators with Euler wrist. The software can be used to interactively perform robotics analysis and off-line programming of robot dynamics such as forward and inverse dynamics as well as to interactively teach and simulate the basic principles of robot dynamics in a very realistic way. In order to demonstrate the user-friendly features of the toolbox much better, simulation of the NS robot manipulator (Stanford Arm) is provided as an example. 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 18: 319 330, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae.20262