Modular and easily reconfigurable robot kinematics
In Robotics, the late "rediscovering" of an old but well-established way to describe the behaviour of rigid bodies in mechanics, the Screw Theory, handled with powerful mathematical tools provided by the Lie Algebra has opened a new stream of applied research for complex robotic mechanisms and multi-axes machines with parallel kinematic architecture (PKM). The increased computational power commonly available nowadays allows for an implementation of very effective and fast-performing kinematic algorithms derived from the theory. Based on the latest achievements in this field, SimX R&D team has developed a revolutionary approach for modelling and simulating any robot device with complex, multi-branched kinematic structures. The method can be used for an automatic synthesis of (forward and inverse) kinematics of tree-type structures. This means that equations describing the motion can be straightforwardly derived by the geometrical description of the mechanism, without the need for designers to use lengthy and error-prone techniques based on the traditional Denavit-Hartenberg approach.
The method has been proved very fast and reliable, so much so that it is suitable for real-time control systems as well.
A more generalized formulation of the algorithm is also applicable to non-pure tree-type structures (i.e. structures with coupled links in different branches). Such a configuration is present in the parallel kinematic machine VERNE, designed and built by Fatronik. The algorithm has been tested using Visual Component simulation software and a CAD model of VERNE provided by CNRS-IRCCyN under the EU 6th Framework project NEXT ("NEXT generation production systems").