A Real-time Hardware-in-the-loop Simulator for Robotics Applications

This paper presents an application to robotics modeling of the multibody free software MBDyn in its real-time variant. Real-time simulation of robots is usually carried on using dedicated software because of the stringent requirements in terms of solution time for each time step. The real-time variant of the general-purpose multibody simulation software MBDyn originated from the need to share a common simulation environment for the detailed and the realtime analysis of complex, heterogeneous multidisciplinary mechanisms, like robots, helicopter and tiltrotor wind-tunnel models, aircraft landing gear and hydro-mechanical components, and more. The capability to simulate the same problem with increasingly detailed models, ranging from compact models for real-time applications to highly sophisticated models for fully detailed analysis and verification, sharing the same model layout and common parts where limited detail suffices, represents a great advantage because the analyst can work in a single, dependable