We have developed a visual simulator for robot arms, and identified
the visual-motor model of our PUMA 760 robot arm. The simulator
combines with Peter Corke's robotics toolbox to form a dynamic and
kinematic visual simulation system for robot arms. Our simulator, along
with the PUMA 760 model is available by
ftp
.
The simulator is based on the eigen-image visual front end and the
off-line synthesis method. Robot movements are commanded in joint
space
, and also, using the toolbox, in world or tool
space. The simulator plans robot trajectories, velocities and
accelerations. With the toolbox the user can also calculate and plot
the required forces from the motors. To make the distribution compact,
a 2 DOF robot model is supplied, which is based on only 24 eigen-images.
The user can run the simulator to test and visually examine the execution of robot programs and control algorithms, while plotting instantaneous joint accelerations, velocities and positions. The execution of a motion command can be seen in fig. 6.8 and the visual result in Fig. 6.9 and Video 7.
Figure 6.8: Instantaneous robot parameters simulated for a move of a PUMA 760
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Figure: 5 out of 30 synthesized views generated from the execution of
the same command that generated the previous figure.
Video 6