Forward kinematics of a 6 DoF robot in Matlab

I am new to Matlab, and I am trying to carry out the kinematic analysis of a 6-axis robot using the Denavit-Hartenberg methodology. The Matlab program must be able to compute the T6 transform matrix and must incorporate the following:

• User data entry of each joint angle (in degrees)
• Joint angle limits
• Define each T transform and compute T6 transform in world coordinates
• Vector output in terms of world coodinates - to include position and orientation.

I understand this is probably a fairly basic task, however I am completely new to the software, so any pointers on what sort of code to use would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Sara Hafeez]

try the file exchange, its very good for what you are looking for.

[Arthur Wilkinson]

Yes, there is some good help on the file exchange. Thanks for that :-)

Answer 1

[Doug Hull]

There are two aspects to this: Manipulating symbolically, all of the matrices, and solving those matrices.

MATLAB is primarily a numeric solver, so solving the matrices for actual location of the end effector is really easy for us. The manipulation of the matrices symbolically is something that would be done with our Symbolic toolbox.

It is not clear what you want from this analysis. Since you mention needing to incorporate the joint angle limits, that makes me believe you are trying to sweep the entire configuration space. That would be numerical, and the visualization of all that volume would be really well done in MATLAB.

[Arthur Wilkinson]

I have created an m-file which asks for the joint angle limits of the robot, and calculates the transform matrices, computing the T6 matrix at the end. However, I am struggling to find out how to compute the vector output in terms of World Coordinates - to include the position and orientation. Any ideas?

Thanks for the responses so far.