Abstract
Robots with flexible links are getting more important in industrial or space applications to improve the payload to deadweight ratio. The use of lightweight material and structural optimization in order to increase this ratio leads to constructions with flexible robot links and drives. This paper presents a new and comprehensive simulation tool for arbitrary combinations of rotational and prismatic joints, which can be used for development of robot systems, diagnostics and controller design. The simulation is based on a model which takes into account both rigid and flexible links and nonlinear effects in the drives of the joints such as friction, backlash, gear elasticity and the performance of the measuring devices. The kinematic description is based on the Denavit-Hartenberg formulation which has been modified for the description of flexible structures. The link flexibility is modeled by shape functions using the Ritz method and has been integrated in the well known effective recursive Luh-Walker-Paul algorithm for manipulator dynamics, which has been extended for flexible structures.
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