A SYMBOLIC AND NUMERIC PROCEDURE FOR MANIPULATOR RIGID-BODY DYNAMIC SIGNIFICANCE ANALYSIS AND SIMPLIFICATION

This paper describes an automated procedure for analysing the signific ance of each of the many terms in the equations of motion for a serial -link robot manipulator. Significance analysis provides insight into t he rigid-body dynamic effects that are significant locally or globally in the manipulator's state space. Deleting those terms that do not co ntribute significantly to the total joint torque can greatly reduce th e computational burden for online control, and a Monte-Carlo style sim ulation is used to investigate the errors thus introduced. The procedu res, freely available, are a hybrid of symbolic and numeric techniques implemented using a standard computer algebra package.