An appropriate tool for optimizing the workspace of 3R robot manipulator

Robotic manipulators with three-revolute (3R) positional configurations are very common in the industrial robots (IRs). The capability of a robot largely depends on the workspace (WS) of the manipulator apart from other parameters. With the constraints in mind the optimization of the workspace is of prime importance in designing the manipulator. The present work aims at obtaining an optimal design of manipulators with three-revolute joints. The optimization problem is formulated considering the workspace volume as the objective function, while constraints are imposed to control the total area. Subsequently the problem is solved using Sequential quadratic programming (SQP, fminmax, goal attainment, constrained non linear minimization) and genetic algorithms (GAs) and a comparision is made. The four different optimization techniques were used to solve numerical example imposing same condition to demonstrate the efficiency of the optimization processes. Numerical example is presented to validate the proposed methodology.