Combined structural and dimensional synthesis of serial robot manipulators

Abstract

The present work addresses the unification of the structural and dimensional synthesis of serial robot manipulators. Unlike related publications, the approach does not utilize simplifications of the kinematic structures. In addition, it is also capable of generating manipulators with up to six degrees of freedom. The approach reduces the computational effort by automatically generating the tasksuitable architectures together with their corresponding optimisation parameters. Since the kinematics modelling is one of the main challenges, an algorithm for the numerical solution of the inverse kinematics is introduced. Finally, in order to demonstrate the capability of the method, the optimal manipulator for a pick and place operation is found using kinematic performance indices and particle swarm optimisation