Modeling and Simulation of an Industrial SCARA Robot: Performance Evaluation Prior to Real-World Task

Industrial robots are widely used in manufacturing and automation environments. Many applications require a physical contact between the robot end-effector and the surrounding environment. Therefore, position and force control are needed. Controlling a robot, however, is successfully achieved by obtaining an accurate dynamic model of the robot. In this paper, the dynamic model of a four degree of freedom (DOF) SCARA robot is derived using MapleSim^® software. To verify the derived model, an impedance controller with specified mass, damping and stiffness is implemented to control the interaction force. In addition, MapleSim^® is successfully used to validate the control algorithm. It is shown that the robot’s performance can be evaluated virtually before assigning the robot to real-world tasks.