Optimizing and Deciphering Design Principles of Robot Gripper Configurations Using an Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization Method

This paper is concerned with the determination of optimum forces extracted by robot grippers on the surface of a grasped rigid object – a matter which is crucial to guarantee the stability of the grip without causing defect or damage to the grasped object. A multicriteria optimization of robot gripper design problem is solved with two different configurations involving two conflicting objectives and a number of constraints. The objectives involve minimization of the difference between maximum and minimum gripping forces and simultaneous minimization of the transmission ratio between the applied gripper actuator force and the force experienced at the gripping ends. Two different configurations of the robot gripper are designed by a state-of-the-art algorithm (NSGA-II) and the obtained results are compared with a previous study. Due to presence of geometric constraints, the resulting optimization problem is highly non-linear and multimodal. For both gripper configurations, the proposed methodology outperforms the results of the previous study. The Pareto-optimal solutions are thoroughly investigated to establish some meaningful relationships between the objective functions and variable values. In addition, it is observed that one of the gripper configurations completely outperforms the other one from the point of view of both objectives, thereby establishing a complete bias towards the use of one of the configurations in practice.