Dynamic performance characteristics of robot manipulators

Robot manipulators have the inherent characteristics of being highly non linear and strongly coupled. The recent increasing demand for industrial robots compounded with their high complexity has provided the robot\u27s designers with a new challenging and time-consuming problem. The reason behind it is that a robot\u27s designer cannot easily predict the effect of changing an operational condition or a geometrical parameter on the dynamic performance. In this dissertation a comprehensive study was conducted to analyse the dynamic characteristics of robot manipulators under different operational condi tions and various structural and geometrical configurations. Therefore, both kine matic and dynamic modelling were extensively used in both iterative and closed form. The analysis was applied on two types of widely-used industrial robots: a) a SCARA type robot and b) articulated robots. The results of the study are aimed at giving further insight into robot dynamic performance in pursuit of an optimal robot\u27s design. That is achievable since the results are also aimed at helping a robot\u27s designer to foresee the effect of changing an operational condition (e.g. velocity or payload) or a geometrical parameter (e.g.a joint\u27s twist angle ora link\u27s length). In this research, a computer plot package was especially developed and used to display the extensive analysis information in a compact form. This helps a robot\u27s designer develop an intuitive feel for his problem and reinforces this by a visual display