Co-Optimizing Robot, Environment, and Tool Design via Joint Manipulation Planning

Existing work on sequential manipulation planning and trajectory optimization typically assumes the robot, environment and tools to be given. However, in particular in industrial applications, it is highly interesting to ask, what would be an optimal robot design, tool shape, or robot station geometry for a particular ensemble of manipulation tasks. To tackle this problem we propose a formulation to jointly optimize over static design parameters and the sequential manipulation trajectory. We can include optimization objectives such as penalizing velocities (path length) and joint torques. Our evaluations show that design optimization can significantly improve on such metrics. For instance, in a wrench tool demonstration scenario we show that the shape of the wrench tool as well as design of the robot can be optimized to allow for exerting a necessary external torque with minimal effort.