A study on a new robot simulation and monitoring system based on PC

Abstract

A new robot simulation and monitoring system has been developed. Running on Pentium II PCs with Windows 95 operation system and being developed with OpenGL, this system has the capacity of real-time simulating the motion of an industrial robot through 3D animation with ray tracing. Connected with the robot controller via network, users can monitor the behavior of the robot dynamically or even directly control the action of the robot if necessary. By comparing with the traditional off-line programming system, the framework and the functions of this system and the hardware and software platform of the system are described. The principle of 3D-motion simulation and both the geometry modeling and kinematics modeling are discussed in more detail. Finally, the paper summarizes the characteristics of the system and discusses the extension prospect of the system.