Automatic dynamics simplification for robot manipulators

An algorithm is presented for automatically generating the simplified dynamics equations of mechanical manipulators using a digital computer. The joint position dependent coefficients of these equations are simplified separately. A decomposition scheme is used for efficiently extracting the significant basis functions for each dynamic coefficient. The significance of each joint variable is tested one by one, then those of combined ones. The minimax approximation is done for constructing the objective dynamic coefficient using the extracted basis functions. FORTRAN programs are written to implement the algorithm. Some experiments are done for the Stanford arm.