3
1
Preface
1 Introduction
This, the seventh release of the Toolbox, represents nearly a decade of tinkering and a sub-
stantial level of maturity. It finally includes many of the features I’ve been planning to add
for some time, particularly MEX files, Simulink support and modified Denavit-Hartenberg
support. The previous release has had thousands of downloads and the mailing list has
hundreds of subscribers.
The Toolbox provides many functions that are useful in robotics including such things as
kinematics, dynamics, and trajectory generation. The Toolbox is useful for simulation as
well as analyzing results from experiments with real robots.
The Toolbox is based on a very general method of representing the kinematics and dynam-
ics of serial-link manipulators. These parameters are encapsulated in Matlab objects. Robot
objects can be created by the user for any serial-link manipulator and a number of examples
are provided for well know robots such as the Puma 560 and the Stanford arm. The Toolbox
also provides functions for manipulating and converting between datatypes such as vec-
tors, homogeneous transformations and unit-quaternions which are necessary to represent
3-dimensional position and orientation.
The routines are written in a straightforward manner which allows for easy understanding,
perhaps at the expense of computational efficiency. My guide in all of this work has been
the book of Paul[1], now out of print, but which I grew up with. If you feel strongly about
computational efficiency then you can always rewrite the function to be more efficient,
compile the M-file using the Matlab compiler, or create a MEX version.
1.1 What’s new
This release has some significant new functionality as well as some bug fixes.
• Full support for modified (Craig’s) Denavit-Hartenberg notation, forward and inverse
kinematics, Jacobians and forward and inverse dynamics.
• Simulink blockset library and demonstrations included, see Section 2
• MEX implementation of recursive Newton-Euler algorithm written in portable C.
Speed improvements of at least 1000. Tested on Solaris, Linux and Windows. See
Section 1.9.
• Fixed still more bugs and missing files in quaternion code.
• Remove ‘@’ notation from
fdyn to allow operation under Matlab 5 and 6.
• Fairly major update of documentation to ensure consistency between code, online
help and this manual.
评论0
最新资源