Objectives

The objective of this research project is to explore the basis for a consistent software and hardware environment, and a flexible framework that enables easy and fast modifications, and optimal design of robot manipulator parameters, with online control, monitoring, and simulation for the chosen manipulator parameters. This environment should provide a mechanism to define design objects that describe aspects of design, and the relations between those objects.

Another goal is to build a prototype three-link robot manipulator. This will help determine the required subsystems and interfaces to build the prototyping environment, and will give us hands-on experience for the real problems and difficulties that we would like to address and solve using this environment.

The importance of this project arises from several points:

• This framework will facilitate and speed the design process of robots.
• The prototype robot will be used as an educational tool in the robotics and automatic control classes.
• This project will facilitate the cooperation of several research groups in the department (VLSI group, Robotics group), and the cooperation of the department with other departments (Mechanical and Electrical Engineering).
• This project will establish a basis and framework for design automation of robot manipulators.

A brief background of robot design and modules is presented in Section 2 with the related work in this area. A review about the current research efforts in building special hardware architectures for robotic applications is represented in Section 3. A detailed description of prototyping and simulating a three-link robot manipulator is presented in Section 4. The communication between the robot and the workstation is discussed in detail in Section 5. The optimal design for robot manipulators is discussed, and the proposed optimal design system is described and investigated in Section 6. Section 7 describes the prototyping environment components such as the interface between the systems and the required representations to implement this interface (e.g., knowledge base, object oriented scheme, rule-based reasoning, etc.). Section 8 shows some examples and results of the implemented systems. In Section 9, conclusions from the work are presented along with possible future extensions. The dynamics equations for the three-link robot, before and after simplifications, are described in Appendix a and Appendix B. The assembly program used in the communication between the robot and the workstation is described in Appendix C.