A direct determination of minimum inertial parameters of robots

A direct method is presented to determine the minimum set of inertial parameters of robots. The set consists of the classical parameters that affect the dynamic model and the regrouped parameters. The method permits to most of the regrouped parameters to be determined by means of a closed-form function of the geometric parameters of the robot. It is proved that the minimum number of inertial parameters is less than 7n-4, where n is the number of joints. The method is general whatever the values of the geometric parameters. The method can be extended to tree structure robots and will be integrated into the software package SYMORO