A Model for Performance Measure of Industrial Robots

Robots play a major role in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) and the performance measure of a robot is one of the critical issues in the design of robotic work cells. Performance measure and selection of robot for an application is usually done based on experience, intuition and at most using the kinematic considerations like workspace, manipulability, etc. This problem has become more cumbersome in recent years due to increasing complexity, available features, and facilities offered by different robotic products. In the present work a systematic procedure is developed for performance measure of robots based on various attributes. Subsequently, the selection procedure proceeds to select the alternatives in the shortlist by employing different attributes based specification methods. This is an attempt to create exhaustive procedure by identifying maximum possible number of attributes for robot manipulators. The selection procedures are illustrated with example.