This article presents a methodology to reduce the energy consumption of an industrial robot. We propose a design for a 3R serial manipulator of general geometry. We show an analytical model aiming to analyze the search space of architectures based on the torsion angles of the robot to determine the optimal architecture that allows the efficient use of energy. The analytical model provides a theoretical estimation of the energy consumption and is validated by monitoring the experimental robot. The numerical calculations obtained with a particular case reduced the energy consumption by approximately 7.5%.

In this article, we improve the efficiency of a turbine blade inspection robotic workcell. The workcell consists of a stationary camera and a 6-axis serial robot that is holding a blade and presenting different zones of the blade to the camera for inspection. The problem at hand consists of a 6-DOF (degree of freedom) continuous optimization of the camera placement and a discrete combinatorial optimization of the sequence of inspection poses (images). For each image, all robot configurations (up to eight) are taken into consideration. A novel combined approach is introduced, called blind dynamic particle swarm optimization (BD-PSO), to simultaneously obtain the optimal design for both domains. The objective is to minimize the cycle time of the inspection process, while avoiding any collisions. Even though PSO is vastly used in engineering problems, the novelty of our combinatorial optimization method is in its ability to be used efficiently in traveling salesman problems where the distances between the cities are unknown and subject to change. This highly unpredictable environment is the case of the inspection cell where the cycle time between two images will change for different camera placements.

This paper presents a concept of sequentially actuated multi-degree-of-freedom (DOF) robot with only one motor. A switching mechanism allowing to actuate sequentially the different joints–or combinations of the joints–of the robot is also proposed. Potential actuation schemes (joint combinations) are presented and their properties are discussed. Cartesian pick-and-place trajectories are then considered using different actuation schemes. An optimisation algorithm is presented in order to provide the best possible sequence by minimising the amplitude of the joint rotations for a given actuation combination. A simple planar two-DOF and the SCARA architectures are used to illustrate the concept. Finally, a prototype is developed with the aim of demonstrating the sequentially actuated manipulator concept.

This paper presents a novel systematic approach to identify the dynamic parameters of robotic manipulators. A sequential identification procedure is first proposed to deal with the difficulties usually encountered with standard approaches. An all-accelerometer inertial measurement unit (IMU) is also suggested to estimate the joint velocities and accelerations, which are traditionally obtained by differentiating the joint positions. The IMU kinematics and the computation method for estimation joint motion from IMUs are provided. The proposed method yields promising results in improving the identification precision compared to conventional methods. Finally, practical experiments are conducted to validate the theoretical results.