Dynamics of General Constrained Robots Derived from Rigid Bodies

A systematic approach for deriving the dynamical expression of general constrained robots is developed in this paper. This approach uses rigid-body dynamics and two kinematics-based mapping matrices to form the dynamics of complex robots in closed form. This feature enables the developed modeling approach to be rigorous in nature, since every actuator and gear-head can be separated into rigid bodies and no assumption about approximation beyond rigid-body dynamics is made. The two kinematics-based mapping matrices are used to govern the velocity and force transformations among three configuration spaces, namely, general joint space, general task space, and extended subsystems space. Consequently, the derived dynamics of general constrained robots maintain the same form and main properties as the conventional single-arm constrained robots. This approach is particularly useful for robots with hyper degrees of freedom. Five examples are given.