Workstation planning for redundant manipulators

The use of redundant manipulators in assembly stations, where a number of pick-and-place tasks needs to be performed, is examined in this paper. The aim is to obtain optimum values for the location of the robot in the workstation, the sequence of tasks and the configuration of the robot at each task location, such that the total travel time is minimized. The location of the robot and the optimal configurations, for a given sequence of tasks, is obtained by formulating and solving a constrained nonlinear optimization problem using the sequential quadratic programming method. A near-optimum sequence of travel is then obtained using simulated annealing. The proposed techniques are illustrated using three numerical examples.