Reconfigurable industrial robots: A stochastic programming approach for designing and assembling robotic arms

Industrial robots undergo design and re-configuration processes to target extremely challenging precision and reliability performance with agile and efficient architectures. The need for such features currently prevent the exploitation of reconfigurable robotics in manufacturing. The current work presents an approach to design and configure reconfigurable robots for the high precision manufacturing industry. The work proposes a configuration algorithm that enables the identification of the robot architectures and the related reconfigurability features by selecting the type and number of robot modules to be implemented over time in order to better accomplish a number of production requirements. Particularly, assuming the robot will work by utilising a finite set of robotic modules, the algorithm determines the set of modules to form the arm and the ones to be allocated in the robot storage for possible usage over time. Results show a number of benefits such as a robotic chain with customised reaching and degrees of freedom with a reduced cost by performing an accurate module selection and configuration; this should lead the robot users to prefer reconfigurable robots to commercial rigid catalogue solutions proposed by robot manufacturers.