Editorial

A fundamental physical understanding of the properties and structure of dynamic robot models is the basis of controller design for robotic manipulators. This paper focuses on the estimation of different parameters which appear in the dynamics models of robots. By introducing candidate functions and a statistical approach to analyze these functions it is possible to identify the significant parameters in the dynamics model of the manipulator. This generalized method is also capable of considering Coloumb and viscous friction effects. Modeling based on candidate functions does not require symbolic calculation for the dynamics of the manipulator and can easily be applied to manipulators with more than 6 d.o.f. Parameter estimation is especially appropriate for modeling manipulators with many degrees of freedom prior to developing control algorithms, where otherwise the computation of such models is overwhelming. It is also demonstrated that this type of modeling is equivalent to the conventional symbolic calculation of dynamics of manipulators.