Abstract
A survey of existing literature on robot research indicated that little work had been done in the area of general dynamic simulation of Industrial robots which possessed the facility for quick evaluation of different robot structures and drive configurations. The Robot Arm Dynamic Simulation Package ( RADSP ) presented in this thesis has been developed with these features in mind to provide rapid assessment of Industrial robots using modular computation. The simulation package is written in FORTRAN 77 and can be executed on a PRIME or other suitable microcomputers. The freebody method is employed for the generation of the kinematic and dynamic motion algorithms because of its simplicity and short procedures which are found to be compatible with the modular concept. The freebody method is employed in the modelling of serial structural robots on the assumption that the Coriolis and Gyroscopic torque terms are insignificant in the robot torque equations at robot velocities. The RADSP consists of simulation program modules which represent the four main parts of an Industrial robot; these are the controller, the power actuator, the joint and the link. Also, the RADSP includes the inverse kinematic, trajectory planning, result, geometrical modelling and graph plotting package modules. The validation of the RADSP was undertaken on the Asea IRb6 robot for the three upper links and on a robot belt - drive. The results of the validation works were found to be acceptable.