Matlab Toolbox for Kinematic Analysis and Simulation of Dexterous Robotic Grippers

Abstract

Robot simulators have supported the science of robotics for a long period and have been an indispensable tool for understanding, planning, designing and programming of educational and industrial robots. These soft tools allows the users to program and test their applications without using the real hardware or even building it since such tools allow the analysis of behaviours and performance beforehand. Some of these soft tools have already been designed and developed for professional as well as educational and research purposes by researchers. However, the majority of these tools are specifically designed for serial manipulators and simulation tools for robotic grasping is rather limited e.g Graspit!, OpenGRASP, SynGrasp, and hence there is a need to develop a general purpose software package for performing different analyses on dexterous robotic hands.In this research work, a new MATLAB based dexterous robotic gripper toolbox is developed with GUI based simulating environment for Kinematic analysis and additional features with inbuilt library of various dexterous grippers of Robot. This toolbox has capabilities like Hand modeling, Grasp definition, Grasp modeling, Grasp analysis and Graphics to support representation of various commercially available existing dexterous grippers and has provision and flexibility to accommodate any newly developed hand. The library of toolbox has different parameters like Denavit - Hartenberg parameters, finger size, and joint angles etc. which are used for kinematics of various dexterous grippers. Form closure analysis is a special feature that has been included for understanding the actual positioning and orientation of fingers of dexterous grippers according to the object position. The library of proposed toolbox has detailed definition of objects to make form closure by various models of dexterous grippers.