Robotic Arm Design and Analysis Repository (RADAR)

The Robotic Arm Design and Analysis Repository (RADAR) is a MATLAB based development package created to assess the design space of robotic arm configurations based on environments and provide comprehensive robotics analysis. RADAR's main capabilities include computing gravitational, thermal, and load-induced deflections; computing body wrenches; propagation and assessment of component/system errors; visualizing environments; and motion planning. The modularity and functionality of RADAR is due to the implementation of a hierarchy of frame-based objects. This enables an elegant design approach for quick configuration changes and offers robust but flexible analysis capabilities. RADAR is currently being used on RTAS (Robotic Transfer Assembly System) of the planned Mars Sample Return Campaign and the focus of this paper is the theory and implementation of RADAR with supporting examples from RTAS.