Toward super-real-time simulation of robotic mechanisms using a parallel integration method

The results of research performed in computational robot dynamics to achieve real-time simulation of a manipulator on a general-purpose vector/parallel computer are presented. After effective vectorization of the complex dynamics equations required in simulation, a coarse-grain parallel block predictor-corrector (BPC) method for performing the motion integration was realized on multiple processors to exploit a form of temporal parallelism. Results on a CRAY Y-MP8/864 show that effective use of vectorization and parallelization yields an order of magnitude speedup resulting in a computational rate 50 times faster than real-time for end-effector position errors on the order of a micron. This translates to real-time performance on a less powerful parallel computing system. >