Development of Optimisation Tools in the Context of an Industrial Robotic CAD Software Product

This paper addresses the development of robotic optimisation tools based on the simulated annealing method. The first part is devoted to an in-depth review of the industrial applications and of the research in the field. Then we propose solutions to two different problems which must be resolved for robotic CAD systems in order to satisfy customer demand: robot placement and point ordering in the context of spot-welding tasks. Once the search spaces have been simplified, the simulated annealing method is applied to minimise the cycle time, which was chosen as a representative criterion. The improvements that can be achieved in manipulator performance by using the solutions are illustrated by examples.

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