Benefitting From Underutilized Task Specific Resources for Industrial Robotic Systems

The 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) industrial manipulator has become a commodity with nominal design variation among brands. Functional differentiation is often achieved through motion planning and task integration software. This paper leverages past research in redundant systems and their control using performance criteria to manage under-utilized resources to improve the task performance of industrial robotic applications. These extra resources are then utilized to improve manipulator performance for existing trajectories such as a trajectory developed with a teach pendant, or to create new motion trajectories. A palletizing simulation is used as a simple example to illustrate the resource identification and optimization procedure.