Design and Simulation of Robot Manipulators Using a Modular Hardware-in-the-loop Platform

The need for developing high quality systems with short and cost-effective design schedules has created an ongoing demand for efficient prototyping and testing tools (Wheelright & Clark, 1992). In many engineering applications failure of a system can have severe consequences, from loss of hardware and capital to complete mission failure, and can even result in the loss of human life (Ledin, 1999). The earliest form of prototyping, physical prototyping, began with the development of the first system, and it refers to fabricating a physical system to evaluate performance and test design alterations. There have been many advances in this field, such as the use of scaled models (Faithfull et al., 2001), but in most cases the time and cost involved in building complete physical prototypes are prohibitive. With the advent of computers a new form of prototyping, termed analytical prototyping, has become a second viable option (Ulrich & Eppinger, 2000). Computer models are generally inexpensive to develop and can be quickly modified to experiment with various aspects of the system. However, this flexibility often comes at the cost of approximations used to model complex physical phenomena, which in turn lead to inaccuracies in the model and system behaviour. A prototyping tool that has been gaining significant popularity in recent years is hardware-in-the-loop simulation, which can effectively combine the advantages of the two traditional prototyping methods. The underlying concept of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation is to use physical hardware for system components that are difficult or impossible to model and link them to a computer model that simulates the other aspects of the system. This technique has been successfully applied to development and testing in a wide range of engineering fields, including aerospace (Leitner, 1996), automotive (Hanselman, 1996), controls (Linjama et al., 2000), manufacturing (Stoeppler et al., 2005), and naval and defence (Ballard et al., 2002). This research investigates the application of HIL simulation as a tool for the design and testing of serial-link industrial manipulators, and proposes a generic and modular robotic hardware-in-the-loop simulation (RHILS) architecture. The RHILS architecture was implemented in the simulation of a standard industrial manipulator and evaluated on its ability to simulate the robot and its usefulness as a design tool. The remainder of this section briefly reviews the state-of-the-art in HIL simulation across a broad range of fields, highlighting some of the key benefits and considerations, and then summarizes the current work of other researchers in the specific field of robotic