DEVELOPMENT OF THE DELTA ROBOT SIMULATION SYSTEM

Abstract

In the last few decades, alongside the development of serial industrial robots, parallel robots have attracted the attention of many industries and researchers. The DELTA robot is one of the most famous parallel kinematic robots. This paper presents the DELTA robot's complete kinematic modelling and simulation system development. The developed kinematic model includes the solution of the inverse and direct kinematic problem and the determination of the Jacobian matrix. Determining the robot's kinematic parameters in the iterative procedure enabled the analysis of the workspace and singular configurations. The kinematic model and both, the direct and inverse kinematic problems are included in the simulation model to realize the motion of the virtual (wireframe) robot. The virtual robot is developed in a MatLab environment. Using the direct kinematic problem, the positions of all actuated and non-actuated joints are calculated. The simulation system, besides others, includes two developed functions for G-code interpretation and Cartesian space linear interpolation. The developed simulation model can provide information about possible collisions of robot elements. In addition, the calculated joint coordinate vector provides information on whether all movements of the robot’s end-effector can be executed according to the joint limits and the given G-code program. Verification of the developed robot simulation system and kinematic model was performed through several examples of the end-effector movement according to the program generated in a CAD/CAM environment.