Performance Comparison in the Optimisation of a Parallel Robot Using Particle Swarm Optimisation

Abstract

Parallel robots have many industrial applications due to their well-known advantages as high operational speeds, stiffness and accelerations. One the other hand, their workspace is reduced compared to the size of the elements of the robot. Frequently, the design of parallel robots implies a large amount of variables and nonlinear equations. This is why, a human designer generally applies optimisation algorithms in order to obtain specific properties of the robot. If the number of variables involved in the optimisation is too high, the required computational times may be extremely increased, aspect that for some applications is unacceptable. This is why, the aim of this paper is to analyse the performance comparison in terms of efficiency and computational times of an optimisation problem with several numbers of variables included in the optimisation. The variable define the geometrical characteristics of a parallel robot used for a solid waste selection system. Also, the optimisation problem is implemented using a heuristic algorithm, namely the Particle Swarm Optimization.