ABSTRACT

This paper presents a mathematical formulation to predict the kinetic and potential energy of a robot manipulator comprising n numbered links. While doing kinematics analysis of robot manipulators utmost importance is given to evaluate the energy required for making the robot move from one position to another for accomplishing any task to be done. Forward kinematics solutions give the positional vectors for computing the position of a robot manipulator after corresponding positional changes due to rotation and translation. Here, using mechanics considerations a general mathematics has been presented to evaluate the energy of a n-link robot manipulator at any certain position from their positional vectors which is found to be useful for dynamic analysis of automated systems as well. The analysis has taken into consideration the mass of each link, their centroidal positions, angular speeds and dimensional parameters. Compared to the conventional methods it ensures easiness to computational mathematics for predicting both the kinetic and potential energy of a robot manipulator and generalizes the computational scheme to be incorporated while designing any automated system of n-links.