A Simulink library for model-based robot manipulators

In “A Simulink Library for Model-Based Development of Robot Manipulators,” Indranil Saha and Natarajan Shankar in the computer sciences department at UCLA describe a robot manipulator for industrial automation applications in which the controller employs inverse kinematics to transform the configuration into joint angles.

The control algorithm is implemented as software and embedded into the robot controller. The software is typically written in traditional programming languages like C or C++.

The design uses a Simulink Library ModelRob to provide basic building blocks to model kinematics of a robot manipulator. Availability of such a library enables Model-Based Development (MBD) of robot manipulator software, where the manipulator controller can be modeled using ModelRob library blocks, and production code can be automatically generated using existing code generators for Simulink.

Using their ModelRob library they have modeled Cartesian space motion controller of a robot manipulator in Simulink and successfully generated C code from the model.