Modeling and Control of a Articulated Robot Arm with Embedded Joint Actuators

Nowadays human-cooperative robot (HCR) become to be used in the industry and cost-effective manufacturing of it is required. The UR5 robot uses only three type of common-structured rotating joint actuators, which differs from size and power. So this robot become famous cost-effective HCR. The embedded rotating joint actuator for UR5-type HCR is known as a "smart actuator", because only connection of them with links becomes a 6-DOF robot manipulator. Recent development of networked motor drive technology with EtherCAT communication makes this connection and operation of robot manipulator easy. The analysis about forward and inverse kinematics for UR5 is found in many literatures. With help of these materials, the dynamic simulation about a smart actuator for UR5 robot is done in this paper. The co-simulation of motor drive and manipulator dynamics is done with Matlab / Simulink and Simscape Multibody. The results shows that the developed smart actuator is good to substitute the joint actuator of UR5 robot.