Integrated Environment for Modelling, Simulation and Control Design for Robotic Manipulators

In this paper an integrated environment for the design of robotic controllers implemented on a PC is described. It is based on the Planar Manipulators Toolbox for dynamic simulation of redundant planar manipulators. The tools are fully integrated in the MATLAB/SIMULINK and hence, a lot of standard tools are available for the analysis and control design. Using the real-time simulation it is possible to apply the developed controllers to a real robot manipulator, which can be included in the system via corresponding interfaces, without any additional coding. The main advantage is the flexibility in fast prototyping of different algorithms in the field of control of robotic systems, especially for redundant manipulators.