Determining User-Prescribed Accelerations for a Serial Robot Motion Simulator

Described in this paper is an approach for generating control inputs for a serial robot motion simulator such that prescribed linear acceleration at the end- effector are accomplished as close as possible. The method takes into account the workspace limits, and uses the internal interpolation cycle of the robot controller to generate the corresponding trajectories. The PI parameters of the internal inter- polation are identified together with characteristic parameters of the robot dynam- ics from test measurements. The path planning algorithm uses the damped least squares method together with a refinement based on optimization for navigating the robot along the user-prescribed accelerations under avoidance of singularities. The approach is demonstrated for the Kuka robot roboCoaster. It is shown that the desired accelerations can be generated accurately and with high repeatability, making the approach suitable for generic simulation tasks.