Dynamics of Two Serially Connected Manipulators

The objective of this paper is to generate a closed form of the equations of motion for two serially connected manipulators. Instead of computing the coupled dynamics directly, this work constructs overall dynamic equations from previously known equations of each manipulator and coupling terms derived in this paper. This approach will reduce the number of computations significantly and show the structure of the coupling dynamics between two arms. The proposed technique has been coded in Malhemalica for symbolic computation. As a case study, the proposed approach is applied to two examples: micro/macro manipulators and a mobile manipulator. Each case shows not only simplicity of derivation but also a reduction in computation time of at least one-third compared to the conventional direct derivation.