Dynamics and Control of Robotic Manipulators with Contact and Friction

6Virtual Simulation of Robot Control

6.1 Overview of Robot Simulation

Robot system simulation is to simulate the actual robot system by computer. It is mainly used to conduct a virtual test of the robot control algorithm. As a computer‐aided tool, the simulation of robot system evolves closely with the development technology of robot.

Robot simulation focuses on three‐dimensional geometric modeling of manipulator entities [1–4], analysis of robot kinematics and dynamics [5–9], trajectory and path planning [10–12], robot interaction with the working environment [13, 14] and humans [14, 15], and offline programming [16–19]. Furthermore, much research has focused on application simulation in special fields, such as robotic surgery [20, 21], robotic welding [22, 23], and massive multi‐robot system [24].

Many robot simulation packages and platforms are also available, including [25–27] MRDS (Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio) (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en‐us/library/bb483024.aspx) [28], which uses NVIDIA™ PhysX™ Technology to enable real‐world physics simulation for robot models; Adams (http://www.mscsoftware.com/product/adams), which is very strong on dynamics simulation to support robot kinematics and dynamics simulation; Webotsk [29, 30], a commercial program for the simulation and prototyping of mobile robots, developed and supported by Cyberbotics Ltd., a leading company in simulation software founded in 1998 as a spinoff from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ...