Concurrent Engineering of Robot Manipulators

Abstract

Concurrent engineering is a promising paradigm for the analysis and synthesis of complex, multidisciplinary systems, such as robot manipulators. It brings synergy as a direct consequence of utilizing design knowledge from all participating disciplines, while interacting with each other, and offering equal opportunities to them to contribute to each state of design simultaneously. The advantage, however, does not come at no cost; one must deal with highly-complicated mechatronic system models, and handle optimizations with a large set of multidisciplinary objective and constraint functions and a great number of design variables. The compromise seems to be either to simplify the system model to reduce dimensions of the design space, or to give up the transparency of the design process and appeal to parallel computing algorithms. This chapter discussed an alternative methodology that does not imply any of the above compromises. The new methodology makes the system model computations efficient without compromising design transparency, because it uses the physical system components in the simulation loop, next to the computational model of those modules that need to be designed. The robotic hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform enables the designer to take into account some complex phenomena that are difficult to model, yet execute the entire simulation in real-time. Using hardware components in concurrence with the computational model of the modules that are to be designed results in an effective platform for rapid design alterations. Moreover, the new methodology alleviates the optimization complexities of concurrent design, because it employs Linguistic Mechatronics that not only transforms the multi-objective constrained optimization problem into a single-objective unconstrained formulation, but also formalizes subjective notions and brings the linguistic aspects of communication into the design process.