A Co-simulation Framework for Dual-arm with MATLAB/ Simulink

This paper presents a MATLAB/Simulink-based framework to co-simulate trajectory tracking for a dual-arm robot in the Robot Operating System (ROS) environment. Conventionally, a dual-arm robot can be controlled in MATLAB/Simulink with its model formed by the Simscape Multibody toolbox. However, due to the highly complex of multi-robot systems, simultaneously simulating the trajectory, controlling the dual-arm robot, and observing robot behaviors in the same environment can slow down the whole process. Therefore, a combination of two simulation environments, MATLAB/Simulink and ROS, is proposed. Firstly, a 3-DOF dual-arm model is implemented in the ROS environment giving visualization. Secondly, the trajectory tracking controller is designed in MATLAB/Simulink sending the robot control signal. The Simulink environment acts as a ROS node to communicate with the robot model in the ROS environment. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed co-simulation framework in reducing the complexity of calculations and simulations.