The Stepper Motor Toolbox provides many functions that are useful in robotics and addresses such areas as kinematics, dynamics, and trajectory generation. The Toolbox is useful for simulation as well as analyzing results from experiments with real robots.
The Toolbox is based on a very general method of representing the kinematics and dynamics of serial-link manipulators by description matrices. These matrices can be created by the user for any serial-link manipulator and a numb er of examples are provided for well known robots such as the Puma 560 and the Stanford arm. Such matrices provide a concise means of describing a robot model and may facilitate the sharing of robot models across the research community. This would allow simulation results to be compared in a much more meaningful way than is currently done in the literature.
The toolbox provides functions for manipulating datatypes such as vectors, homogeneous transformations and unit-quaternions which are necessary to represent 3-dimensional position and orientation. It also has facilities to graphically display the pose of any robot, given just the Denavit and Hartenberg parameters. The robot is drawn as a series of line segments linking the origins of the link reference frames, as shown below for a Puma 560 robot in the zero angle pose.
The toolbox can be obtained from the Mathworks server in Unix tar or zip format. To install the Toolbox it would be best to grab all files since they are somewhat interdependent. Simply copy all the .m files into a directory 'stepper' which is in your MATLABPATH. Check out the README and the documentation robot.ps. which is in the MathWorks standard style and formatted for double sided printing (it's around 70 pages). Run the demo `rtdemo' to see how to use this.
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Many people are using the Toolbox for teaching and this is something that I would encourage. If you plan to duplicate the documentation for class use then every copy must include the front page of the original manual provided in PostScript format with the release.
If you want to cite the Toolbox please use
@ARTICLE{Corke96b,
AUTHOR = {P.I. Corke},
JOURNAL = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine},
MONTH = mar,
NUMBER = {1},
PAGES = {24-32},
TITLE = {A Robotics Toolbox for {MATLAB}},
VOLUME = {3},
YEAR = {1996}
}
The current version is (August 1996). even though the VERSION file says otherwise.
I'm working (slowly) on a new version to exploit features of MATLAB 5 and Simulink 2.2. This includes replacing the dh and dyn matrices with structures, and Simulink blocks that let you wire up robots, animations, Jacobians etc.
I can be reached by email at sagonzal@fi.mdp.edu.ar.
Page by Sergio Alejandro Gonzalez. Last Modified: Friday, July 02, 1999