Integrated Design of Lightweight Robot Manipulators

摘要

In this work, we developed a computational environment for the integrated design of lightweight robot manipulators, which we call MECANISMO 2.0. This computational environment links Ansys®, Matlab®, Simulink® and Maple® and allows integrated structural and control optimization with respect to the desired tasks. With this tool, new results for the design of lightweight robot manipulators were obtained. Two test cases were considered: a single-link flexible arm and a two-link flexible arm which performs a drilling process. The results show a significant improvement in the performance of the robot when compared to designs with constant cross sections of the arm links.