Cobots Designed for Strength, Not Stiffness

IF 3.6 3区计算机科学 Q2 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS

IEEE Access Pub Date : 2025-07-22 DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3591262

Thierry Hubert;Amin Khorasani;Muhammad Usman;Hafsa Nouhi;Raphaël Furnémont;Bram Vanderborght;Greet Van De Perre;Tom Verstraten

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Abstract

Conventional industrial robots are designed to be as stiff as possible to ensure high positioning accuracy. The stiffness of a structure is, however, strongly related to its mass, leading to heavy structures. This paper aims to quantify the potential gain of reducing and eliminating the stiffness constraints, which is of lesser importance for collaborative robots, by investigating the effect of applying different optimization objectives. The resulting optimized designs are quantitatively compared using a set of performance measures and evaluated against the traditional stiffness-designed approach. It was concluded that significant improvements can be made, e.g. the robot’s mass can be reduced up to 74% compared to traditionally stiff-designed robots. The dependency of the payload as well as the structural/actuator mass distribution on the optimized results is investigated and proved to have a significant influence on the potential improvements when allowing reduced structural rigidity. The relationship between structural mass and actuator mass is investigated and compared to commercially available cobots.

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为强度而不是刚度设计的协作机器人

传统的工业机器人被设计成尽可能的刚性，以确保高定位精度。然而，结构的刚度与它的质量密切相关，这导致了结构的沉重。本文旨在通过研究应用不同优化目标的效果，量化减少和消除对协作机器人不太重要的刚度约束的潜在收益。使用一组性能指标对优化后的设计进行了定量比较，并对传统的刚度设计方法进行了评估。结论是可以做出重大改进，例如，与传统的刚性设计机器人相比，机器人的质量可以减少高达74%。研究了有效载荷以及结构/执行器质量分布对优化结果的依赖性，并证明在允许降低结构刚度时对潜在的改进有重大影响。研究了结构质量和执行机构质量之间的关系，并与市售协作机器人进行了比较。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

IEEE Access COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMSENGIN-ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC

CiteScore

9.80

自引率

7.70%

发文量

6673

审稿时长

6 weeks

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