UPE: Utah Prototyping Environment for Robot Manipulators

Mohamed Dekhil, Tarek M. Sobh, Thomas C. Henderson, and Robert Mecklenburg

Department of Computer Science
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112

Abstract

Developing an environment that enables optimal and flexible design of robot manipulators using reconfigurable links, joints, actuators, and sensors is an essential step for efficient robot design and prototyping. Such an environment should have the right ``mix'' of software and hardware components for designing the physical parts and the controllers, and for the algorithmic control of the robot modules (kinematics, inverse kinematics, dynamics, trajectory planning, analog control and digital computer control). Specifying object-based communications and catalog mechanisms between the software modules, controllers, physical parts, CAD designs, and actuator and sensor components is a necessary step in the prototyping activities. In this paper, we propose a flexible prototyping environment for robot manipulators with the required subsystems and interfaces between the different components of this environment.

• Introduction
• Background
• The Prototyping Environment
  • Overall Design
  • Communication Protocols
  • Prototyping Environment Database
  • Constraints and Update Rules Compiler
  • The Generated Code
• Implementation
  • The Central Interface
  • The PE Control System
  • Initial Implementation of the SSIs
  • The Central Interface Monitor
• Results
• Conclusion
• References
• About this document ...