Towards Task Tailored Articulated Robot Designs

The objective of this research is to demonstrate that conventional robot designs, typically characterised by orthogonal axis placement, can be improved, tailoring the design to a task or task ensemble. For that purpose we develop a co-optimization pipe-line specialized to the combined optimization of design and task execution. Our pipe-line pursues high realism by proposing a link deformation strategy that preserves manufacturability of the deformed links, specifically leaving the actuators unaffected. We demonstrate the approach on a proprietary industrial robot, tailoring the design to two time optimal task definitions. We demonstrate that task execution times can be reduced up to 15%.