Co-design optimizes heavy-duty electric robot arm structures and actuators
Structure-Actuation Co-Design of All-Electric Heavy-Duty Robotic Manipulators
Robotics
Summary
Big robot arms need careful matching of their parts and motors to work well without being too heavy or using too much energy. The authors created a method that looks at the arm’s shape and which motors to use at the same time. They tested this method on a robot arm that must hold and move a heavy tool in many positions, and found several good designs. The method adjusts the parts until the arm’s total weight and energy use make sense together, helping build better robot arms for tough jobs.
What this means in practice
- •For industrial robot builders: Design robotic arms with matched structures and motors optimized for payload and energy use to improve heavy-duty task efficiency.
- •For automation equipment engineers: Choose actuator packages for heavy robots that balance weight, cost, and energy needs, enabling better factory automation hardware design.
Authors
Mohammad Bahari, Amir Hossein Barjini, Jouni Mattila
Abstract
This paper presents a mixed discrete-continuous multiobjective bilevel framework for the structure-actuation co-design of all-electric heavy-duty robotic manipulators. The upper level optimizes manipulator geometry and actuation topology, while joint-specific lower-level searches construct feasible archives of discrete motor, gearbox, and screw configurations. A system-level coordinator selects actuator packages according to hardware mass, co-design cost, and loss-aware supply energy, and the resulting actuator masses are fed back to the robot model until a mass-consistent fixed point is obtained. Evaluation on a full-pose SE(3) benchmark with a 100-kg tool payload yields eight feasible nondominated designs, all satisfying the 12 prescribed poses. Actuator-mass coupling converges in three iterations for every reported design. A fixed-design ablation shows that one-pass sequential sizing changes hardware mass by up to 2.13%, co-design cost by 10.20%, and supply energy by 9.40% in magnitude. Payload screening further reveals increasing mass-cost-energy demand and changes in competitive mechanism topology with carried load.