Publication

Abstract : The advent of highly efficient computer simulation tools has brought about a paradigm shift in any product design and development process. The growing use of computer simulation in the robot design process is not an exception. Since, the design of a robot generally involves a multi-body mechanical system driven by microprocessor based sophisticated control system, a wide variety of simulation software (e.g,. ADAMS, MATLAB/Simulink, LabVIEW etc.) are required for the simulation of several aspects of the design of a robot. In that respect, RecurDyn is a suitable multi-body dynamics software which has the capabilities of simulating a control system along with the mechanical system using its CoLink toolkit. In this paper, we present a method for realistic modeling and dynamic simulation of KUKA KR5 industrial robot using RecurDyn. The control algorithm is modeled in CoLink and is integrated with RecurDyn to carry out the dynamic co-simulation of the robot. The plots showing end-effector coordinates and driving torques with time were obtained which can give useful information in optimizing the robot design. Also, it can help students in learning and understanding robot's kinematics and dynamics in an enhanced way.