Dynamic positioning of closed chain robot mechanisms in virtual reality environments

Moving the individual components of a chain in response to forces and torques on any of its links is a difficult problem to solve for real-time applications, e.g. for a virtual reality application. Here, an original method using dynamics is proposed to move the individual parts of chain mechanisms which are resident in a virtual reality environment. The computation of this method is straightforward, and uses a new formulation suited to virtual reality to build the dynamic model. With this approach neither the kinematic nor the inverse kinematic models are needed. Simulations of a five link planar closed system and of a three DOF parallel robot are used to demonstrate the method. An interface method which enables both the position and the orientation of the held link to be altered is also described