Evolutionary Design of a Robotic Manipulator for a Highly Constrained Environment

This paper presents the design of a manipulator working in a highly constrained workspace. The difficulties implied by the geometry of the environment lead to resort to evolutionary-aided design techniques. As the solution space is likely to be shaped strangely due to the particular environment, a special attention is paid to support the algorithm exploration and avoid negative impacts from the problem formulation, the fitness function or the evaluation. In that respect, a specific genome able to encompass all cases is set up and a constraint compliant control law is used to avoid the arbitrary penalization of robots. The presented results illustrate the methodology adopted to work with the developed evolutionary-aided design tool.