Combined Structural-Dimensional Synthesis of Robot Manipulators for Minimal Energy Consumption

The present work addresses the synthesis of robot manipulators for energy consumption minimization considering the influence of the kinematic architecture. The introduced approach aims to find a manipulator with the lowest energy consumption while – unlike related publications – taking all task-suitable architectures into account. The proposed method automatically generates a set of task-suitable architectures together with their specific adjustable design parameters. Inverse dynamics is calculated in symbolic form for each architecture in order to reduce the computational effort during the synthesis. Furthermore, the optimal manipulator for an exemplary pick and place operation is determined by a particle swarm optimization, using the energy consumption as optimization index.