How to visualize joint speed of a 6DOF robot

Hello, anyone knows how to visualize joint speed, accelereation etc. of a 6DOF robot? I built a manipulation scene on Matlab and a simscape multibody with inverse&forward kinematics blocks on Simulink. Is there a function in matlab or maybe a block in simulink to do this? I'll be appreciated any help I can get.

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

[Ayush Anand]

Hi Denizhan,

You can visualize the joint speed, acceleration, and other dynamics of a 6DOF robot using the Robotics System toolbox in MATLAB and appropriate blocks in Simulink.

Here’s how you can do it in MATLAB:

You can use the Robotics System Toolbox to visualize and analyze the kinematics and dynamics of your robot. The toolbox provides models like “jointSpaceMotionModel” which can be used to model the robot. The “derivative” function from the toolbox can be then used to compute joint velocities and accelerations given a set of joint positions and times. Here’s how you can use the same:

% motionModel = jointSpaceMotionModel("RigidBodyTree",robot); 
[t,robotState] = ode45(@(t,state)derivative(motionModel,state,targetState),tspan,initialState); 

%where tspan,initialState and targetState can be defined as per simulation scenario 
%You can then use the robotState variable to calculate and plot velocities and accelerations using MATLAB's gradient and plotting functions. 

You can refer to the following page to read more on the “derivative” function from the Robotics toolbox and go through an example that shows how to create and use a “jointSpaceMotionModel” object for a manipulator robot in joint-space:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/robotics/ref/jointspacemotionmodel.derivative.html

You could do the same in Simscape multibody using the “6-DOF Joint” blocks with sensors enabled to measure joint positions, velocities, and accelerations. These measurements can be outputted to Simulink signals. You can use a “Scope” block to visualize the signals during simulation.

You can refer to the following page for more information on how to use the 6-DOF Joint blocks in Simscape Multibody:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/sm/ref/6dofjoint.html

I hope this helps resolve your query!