Interactive Analysis of Industrial Robots: Orthogonal Architectures, Kinematical Design and Simulation

This book focuses on the kinematic analysis, design, and simulation of industrial robots, making these topics easily accessible to students and engineers through an interactive scheme. Using a decoupling approach, the book introduces closed-form solutions to the inverse kinematics problem of robots with six degrees of freedom, readily available for fast and efficient computations aimed at simulation and control. These solutions are encapsulated in a set of algorithms presented in a unified and unique structure, providing the reader with all the mathematical tools necessary for the analysis of any orthogonal architecture. Programming and interactive aspects of the work are accessible to readers familiar with C++, through a complete open-source project containing a set of classes required for analysis, simulation, and graphical rendering of robot arms. Case studies are also discussed to provide guidelines for developing custom applications. For readers not familiar with programming, a graphical interface is provided with all the tools necessary for simulation and graphical rendering. The flexibility of the interface allows the rendering of industrial robots in their actual CAD-design or in their skeleton representation with reference frames. The implementation of such tools is inspired by the need to facilitate the learning process of concepts related to the study of kinematic chains.