An Open-Source Toolbox for Motion Analysis of Closed-Chain Mechanisms

Many situations in Robotics require an effective analysis of the motions of a closed-chain mechanism. Despite appearing very often in practice (e.g. in parallel manipulators, reconfigurable robots, or molecular compounds), there is a lack of general tools to effectively analyze the complex configuration spaces of such systems. This paper describes the CUIK suite, an open-source toolbox for motion analysis of general closed-chain mechanisms. The package can determine the motion range of the whole mechanism or of some of its parts, detect singular configurations leading to control or dexterity issues, or find collision- and singularity-free paths between given configurations. The toolbox is the result of several years of research and development within the Kinematics and Robot Design group at IRI, Barcelona, and is available under GPLv3 license from http://www.iri.upc.edu/cuik.