UPE: Utah Prototyping Enviroment for Robot Manipulators

Developing an environment that enables optimal and flexible design of robot manipulators using reconfigurable links, joints, actuators, and sensors is an essential step for efficient robot design and prototyping. Such an environment should have the right "mix" of software and hardware components for designing the physical parts and the controllers, and for the algorithmic control of the robot modules (kinematics, inverse kinematics, dynamics, trajectory planning, analog control and digital computer control). Specifying object-based communications and catalog mechanisms between the software modules, controllers, physical parts, CAD designs, and actuator and sensor components is a necessary step in the prototyping activities. In this paper, we propose a flexible prototyping environment for robot manipulators with the required subsystems and interfaces between the different components of this environment. IThis work was supported by ARPA grant N00014-91-J-4123, NSF grant CDA 9024721, and a University of Utah Research Committee grant. All opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agencies. This report was submitted as a paper to the 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. UPE: Utah Prototyping Environment for Robot Manipulators Mohamed Dekhil, Tarek M. Sobh, Thomas C. Henderson, and Robert Mecklenburg* Department of Computer Science University of Utah Salt Lake City, Utah 84112