OPTIMAL POINT TO POINT PATH PLANNING OF FLEXIBLE MANIPULATOR UNDER LARGE DEFORMATION BY USING HARMONY SEARCH METHOD

This paper aims at planning an optimal point to point path for a flexible manipulator under large deformation. For this purpose, the researchers use a direct method and meta-heuristic optimization process. In this paper, the maximum load carried by the manipulator and the minimum transmission time are taken as objective functions of the optimization process to get optimal path profiles. Kinematic constraints, the maximum velocity and acceleration, the dynamic constraint of the maximum torque applied to the arms and also the constraint of final point accuracy are discussed. For the optimization process, the Harmony Search (HS) method is used. To evaluate the effectiveness of the approach proposed, simulation studies are reviewed by considering a two-link flexible manipulator with the fixed base. The findings indicate that the proposed method is in power of dealing with nonlinear dynamics of the system. Furthermore, the results obtained by rigid, small and large deformation models are compared with each other.