Abstract:
Future production systems must meet the continual demands for improved productivity and energy efficiency. Being flexible and adaptable, reconfigurable systems offer grea...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Future production systems must meet the continual demands for improved productivity and energy efficiency. Being flexible and adaptable, reconfigurable systems offer great opportunities to face these challenges. Against this background, this letter is concerned with the reconfiguration planning of Delta-like parallel robots. Following the trend of equipping the original Delta robot with additional rotational dof, a potential analysis reveals a great variety of dimensional and functional reconfiguration possibilities. Based on this, the reconfiguration planning is optimized applying operations research techniques. In this approach, a fixed number of configurations is optimally selected from the entire configuration space and simultaneously allocated to a set of handling tasks in a most energy efficient way. Each allocation's energy consumption is efficiently computed using Kane's inverse dynamics formulation. The outcome of a case study demonstrates the general applicability and energy-saving potential of the proposed method.
Published in: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters ( Volume: 2, Issue: 3, July 2017)