Reconfigurable industrial robots—an integrated approach to design the joint and link modules and configure the robot manipulator

Abstract

Reconfigurable industrial robots constitute a key leverage to match geometric and technological features’ changes of processes and products. Current solutions of reconfigurable robots cannot guarantee strong industrial requirements of accuracy, speed and robustness. The present work proposes a design approach that determines the robots’ architectures and reconfigurability features by following three fundamental design steps: the construction of robotic joints and links; the robot (re)configuration based on ad hoc MILP Mixed Integer Linear Programming model; the robot torque assessment in critical poses. Results show up to 28% gained benefits in performance compared to industrial monolithic robots in terms of customization, architectures and investments costs while guaranteeing the achievement of cutting edge performance.