ROBOT DYNAMICS

The dynamics of a robot manipulator describes how the robot moves in response to the actuator
forces. It describes why and how a motion occurs when forces and moments are applied on
massive bodies.
Dynamic equations of motion relate position, velocity and acceleration of links of the
manipulator to the forces applied to its links. As the links of manipulators are three dimensional
bodies with defined dimensions, the dynamic analysis have to consider their orientation, angular
velocity and angular acceleration.
The dynamic equations that describe manipulator motion are coupled sets of highly nonlinear
ordinary differential equations for which closed-form analytical solutions are not available.
Physically, the coupling terms represent gravitational torques, which depend on positions of the
joints; reaction torques, due to acceleration of other joints; and Coriolis and centrifugal torques.
The magnitude of these interaction torques depends on the physical characteristics of the
manipulator and the load it carries.
The control system design is complicated by these effects. A simple task, like inserting a peg in a
hole, must be broken down into subtasks, and appropriate control strategies must be switched in
and out of the control loop by some higher level process.

There are basically two problems in robot dynamics.

Problem 1
We want the links of a robot to move in a specified manner. What forces and moments are
required to achieve the motion? Problem 1 is called direct dynamics and is easier to solve when
the equations of motion are in hand because it needs differentiating of kinematics equations. The
first problem includes robots statics because the specified motion can be the rest of a robot. In
this condition, the problem reduces to finding forces such that no motion takes place when they
act. However, there are many meaningful problems of the first type that involve robot motion
rather than rest. An important example is that of finding the required forces that must act on a
robot such that its end-effector moves on a given path and with a prescribed time history from
the start configuration to the final configuration.

Robot Statics: At the beginning and at the end of a rest-to-rest mission, a robot must keep the
specified configurations. To hold the position and orientation, the actuators must apply some
required forces to balance the external loads applied to the robot. Calculating the required
actuators’ force to hold a robot in a specific configuration is called robot statics analysis.

Problem 2
The applied forces and moments on a robot are completely specified. How will the robot move?
The second problem is called inverse dynamics and is more difficult to solve since it needs
integration of equations of motion. However, the variety of the applied problems of the second
type is interesting. Problem 2 is essentially a prediction since we wish to find the robot motion
for all future times when the initial state of each link is given. In this Part we develop techniques
to derive the equations of motion for a robot.
Approaches to Robot Dynamics Modeling
To derive the dynamic equations of motion of manipulators two types of methods are usually
followed.
1. Newton-Euler Method
In classical mechanics, the Newton–Euler equations describe the combined translational and
rotational dynamics of a rigid body. These laws relate the motion of the center of gravity of a
rigid body with the sum of forces and torques (or synonymously moments) acting on the rigid
body. In this method we start from a link and move on to another links one by one transforming
acceleration and then return through same path finding forces and torques from one link to
another (i.e. forward and backward recursive equations).The Newton-Euler formulation is
usually the preferred choice for manipulators with many degrees of freedom.
The reason is the recursive structure which the formulation is based on. If the frames are attached
in a convenient way, the recursions will be greatly simplified.

2. Lagrangian Method
The Lagrangian method is based on energy of the links. The Lagrangian is kinetic energy of the
manipulator minus its potential energy. This Lagrangian is used for deriving the dynamic
equations of motion of a manipulator. The Lagrangian approach usually provides a powerful and
versatile method for the formulation of the equations of motion for holonomic systems.
However, for non-holonomic systems, the usual method is to introduce the motion constraint
equations into the dynamic equations using the additional Lagrange multipliers. These
multipliers are not constants and are usually functions of all the generalized coordinates and
often of time as well. They represent a set of unknowns whose values should be obtained as a
part of the solution. To solve this computational complexity, additional methods have been
suggested to remove the presence of the multipliers from the dynamic equations of the given
system.

ROBOT CONTROL

Control is the science of desired motion. It relates the dynamics and kinematics of a robot to a
prescribed motion.
Path or trajectory planning is a part of control, in which we plan a path followed by the
manipulator in a planned time profile.
In trajectory planning, we interpolate or approximate the desired path by a class of polynomial
functions and generates a sequence of time-based control set points for the control of
manipulator from the initial configuration to its destination.
Paths can be planned in joint or Cartesian space. Joint path planning directly specifies the time
evolution of the joint variables. However, Cartesian path specifies the position and orientation of
the end frame. So, path includes attaining a desired target from an initial configuration. It may
include avoiding obstacles. Joint path planning is simple because it does not involve inverse
kinematics, but it is hard to digest the motion of the manipulator in Cartesian space. However,
Cartesian coordinates make sense but need inverse kinematics calculation.

Path Planning
Path planning includes three tasks:
1. Defining a geometric curve for the end-effector between two points.
 2. Defining a rotational motion between two orientations.
3. Defining a time function for variation of a coordinate between two given values. All of
these three definitions are called path planning.

Figure 1 illustrates a path of the tip point of a manipulator between points P1 and P2 to avoid two
obstacles.

Figure 1: A path of the tip point of a manipulator to avoid two obstacles.

Software Failure
The most common kind of robot failure is not mechanical or electronic failure but rather failure
of the software that controls the robot. Most people severely underestimate the amount of time
that is necessary to write control software. A program can be hacked together in a couple nights,
but if a robot is to be able to deal with a spectrum of situations in a capable way, more work will
be required. Also, it is very difficult to be developing final software while still making hardware
changes. Any hardware change will necessitate software changes. Some of these changes may be
obvious but others will not. The message is to finalize mechanical and sensor design early
enough to develop software based upon a stable hardware platform.
Sensor Unreliability
A variety of problems afflict typical robot sensors:
(i) Spurious Sensor Data
Most sensors will occasionally generate noise in their output. For example, an infrared sensor
might indicate the infrared light is present when actually no light is present. Or, a proximity
sensor might give a questionable reading. If the noise is predictable enough, it can be filtered out
in software. The noisy IR sensor might not be trusted until it gives some number of consecutive
readings in agreement with one another. However, if the noise problem is very bad, a sensor
might be rendered useless -- or worse, dangerous -- if the program running the robot places too
much trust in the sensor reading.
(ii) Missed Sensor Data
Affiliated with the problem of noisy data is missed data, where for either electrical or software
reasons, a sensor reading is not detected -- a light sensor changes state twice before the software
can count it, or a touch sensor jams and fails to trigger.
(iii) Corrupted Sensor Data
Sensor data can be adversely affected by ambient environmental conditions or battery strength.
To some extent, unruly sensor data can be filtered or otherwise processed "at the source," that is,
before higher-level control routines see it. In a similar way, sensor data could be averaged,
smoothed, or otherwise processed before interpretation. It is logical to assign individual routines
to perform this activity for any sensor that might need to be dealt with in a particular way. Using
the multi-tasking capabilities of IC, each sensor or sensor sub-system could be assigned its own
C process to perform this activity.