An Optimal Architectural Design for Unconventional Modular Reconfigurable Manipulation System

Abstract

Modular and Reconfigurable manipulators have gained popularity especially in the service sector, where the use of customized configurations has increased. Adaptable modular designs have come into advances in achieving the required configuration of a robotic manipulator. As reported in the literature, various designs of the modules mainly with conventional configurations are presented and a few are reported with unconventional adjustments. To cater the non-repetitive applications, this paper presents an optimal architectural design for unconventional parameters for customized reconfigurability. This lighter and easier to connect version is also applicable to n-DoF and unconventional robotic parameters. Architecture Prominent Sectioning (APS) strategy is proposed which assumes an architecture as a set of point masses and optimally relocate components with respect to the minimization of the joint torques. Modules are considered to be 3-D printables using poly-lactic acid (PLA), a thermoplastic material, and thus light in weight. The new modular architecture design is validated through the assemblage of conventional/unconventional configurations using two types of modules namely Heavy(H) and Light(L). Along with that, worst torque analysis for the different configurations has been done in order to provide a strategy for assembly combinations. A comparative study is presented based upon the payload to the manipulator weight ratio, involving other reported architectures.

Synthesizing Modular Manipulators For Tasks With Time, Obstacle, And Torque Constraints

“…In [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23] explored different techniques for finding robot design such that the task-reaching a set of points in 3D-is feasible. While in [3,4,5,6,7,9,10,8] the authors analyzed kinematic requirements, such as dexterity [4,6], manipulability [10] and maximization of reachable space [5], in [11,12,23,13,15,16,17,18,20,19,21,22,14,20], the authors also incorporated torque specifications in their formulation.…”

“…Both static and dynamic components of the torque were incorporated in [13,12,14]. However, the authors only examined environments without obstacles, whose presence restricts the robot's collision-free reachable space.…”

Genetic Optimization of a Manipulator: Comparison between Straight, Rounded, and Curved Mechanism Links

“…Patel [15] used a simulated annealing algorithm, while Ha [16] addressed the issue using a heuristic-guided tree search algorithm. Whitman [17] and Dogra [18] applied a deterministic quasi-Newton algorithm to find the local minimum of a cost function.…”

Integrated Modular Solution for Task Oriented Manipulator Configuration Design

“…Given an environment and the working locations, a robotic solution strategy has been provided by the various researchers -using modularity and reconfiguability, but is never integrated. Attention is required to provide a modular solution which can directly give the modular configurations based upon the prescribed task [7]. Configuration synthesis has been explored by many reseachers in recent years providing different frameworks considering various factors such as reachability, kinematic and dynamics performances, obstacle avoidance, path planning etc.…”

“…[17] presented a motion planner which also synthesizes the manipulator for required tasks which includes elimination of the joints to reduce the DoF if required. Along with that, various modular designs has been presented in literature to provide the customized solutions and can be seen in [4,11,18,16,13,7] These solutions are majorly explored on the basis of generating modular compositions from a given set of modules and then checking the configurations if able to work or not on the prescribed tasks. Alongside, the configurations are explored mostly for a fixed DoF system and standard parameters.…”