Parallel robots modelling and optimization

Abstract

Abstract Parallel robots are mechanical systems with numerous applications in manufacturing, medicine, space industry, etc. Such robots are characterized by closed kinematic chains ensuring robustness and maneuverability. The design of a fully functional parallel robot is a time-consuming task as an engineer needs to enumerate and compare many variants in order to find one with the best characteristics. Typical characteristics are the area of the workspace, the number of singularity-free regions, dexterity index. The design of a parallel robot is thus a multi-objective constraint optimization problem. We propose to use interval analysis to reliably compute characteristics and multiobjective optimization methods to find the Pareto-optimal set of robot parameters. The proposed approach is illustrated on a set of several realistic parallel robotic systems.