Kinematic-based structural optimization of robots

Abstract

In this paper a detailed description of a method is presented to estimate the minimum structural dimensions of the robot arms. A comparative study is conducted between the harmony search and artificial bee colony algorithms in this scientific application. The comparison process was done through the kinematic equations of the serial robot manipulator to find the optimum lengths of links of the robot. A novel design for a seven-degrees-of-freedom robot arm was presented to conduct the comparative study on the presented optimization algorithms. This novel robot mimics the functionality of the SANDVIK robot arm for tunnelling works, but the presented type synthesis was designed to overcome the restrictions on the original SANDVIK arm.