Joint kinematics and dynamics analysis of a 6-DOF loading and unloading industrial robot based on ADAMS and ANSYS

Abstract. Accurate kinematics analysis and dynamics simulation are very important for checking the strength and stiffness of a robot's structure, which is helpful in the design of robot structures and judging the service life of a robot. In this study, a 6-DOF industrial robot was studied, and the ADAMS and ANSYS joint dynamics simulation method based on kinematics analysis was proposed. By establishing the floating coordinate system of the moving joint and using the transformation matrix to obtain the space pose of the robot end effector, the forward kinematics theoretical model was built. On the premise of the end pose, the rotation angle of the robot's moving joint was obtained by inverse transformation, and the inverse kinematics theoretical model was established. Then, according to the results of the kinematics analysis, ADAMS was used to simulate the whole process of loading and unloading of industrial robots to obtain the motion characteristics of each joint, and this was imported into ANSYS Workbench for transient dynamics analysis to obtain the bearing status of each part of the industrial robot in the loading and unloading process and to check the strength and stiffness of the structure of the loading and unloading robot. During the loading and unloading process, the maximum stress of the robot was 10.241 MPa and the maximum strain was 0.00014501, which were far less than the respective yield strengths of 304 stainless steel and 6061 aluminum alloy. The maximum deformation of the robot was 0.025272 mm, the overall deformation value was low, and the stiffness also met the design requirements. It can be seen clearly that the simulation results based on kinematics analysis are more real and reliable. Finally, this work proposes a novel, real, and accurate simulation method using ADAMS and ANSYS to carry out transient dynamics analysis to realize the strength and stiffness of the robot, which can be used to determine the support and service life of the industrial robot structure design.