Simscape Multibody Modeling of an H-Frame Type XY Positioning System

Dynamic modeling of complicated mechanical systems using physical component models created through MATLAB® Simscape™ Multibody™ software has been gaining increasing attention. This paper considers the application of this software to accurately model a belt driven H-frame type XY positioning table. Before this could be accomplished, a method for modeling belt compliance had to be developed, as this capability (at the time of the investigation) was not innately built into the software. The method that was developed involves breaking down system-level belt compliance into components and lumping the resultants as “springs” within the mechanical model for each degree of freedom of the end effector. This approach was used to add compliance to the Multibody model, at which point it was simulated against an Sth-Order State-Space model of the system that was developed and verified in a previous work. The results show that the belt compliance modeling method for the Multibody model presented here is an effective way to do this and provides an option for more accurate physical modeling of compliant members in Multibody which is a viable approach to model complicated physical systems.