Mechanical Design Optimization of a 6DOF Serial Manipulator Using Genetic Algorithm

Robots are becoming increasingly more common in the industry. In order to expand the use of robotic manipulators to complex tasks, a higher degree of tailoring of robots may be required. Tailoring of the mechanical design of a robot manipulator can be formulated as an optimization problem and we propose to use Genetic Algorithms (GA) to optimize link lengths, link diameters, and link thickness in order to determine the robot design for a given fitness function. As a case, the optimization of a robot manipulator for automated cleaning of fish processing plants is presented. For this application, the kinematic layout and joint configuration are decided beforehand. The dynamics of the robotic manipulator are presented along with the optimization algorithm and implemented in Java. Results show that the GA is well suited for the optimization of the design.