On Nov 21, 2016, Dr.Haibin Yin was invited by the director of Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Technology —Professor Guilin Yang to give an academic report in Ningbo Institute of Industrial Technology, CAS. Dr.Yin gave us a speech named “A Unified Design on Lightweight Robotic Arms Based on Torque Density Curves”.

This report presents a unified design on lightweight robotic arms based on a unified description of structure and drive trains. In the unified design, the drive trains and structural dimensions are parameterized as design variables, and a major objective minimizes the total mass of robotic arms satisfying the constraint conditions and design criteria. To implement the optimization problem, a mapping relationship between mass and torque of drive trains is introduced as their torque-density curves, which enable a unified description of structure and drive trains combining with the dynamics of robotic arms. In this implementation of unified design, there are two modules: structure optimization and drive trains design. The Finite Element method (FEM) with Nonlinear Programming by Quadratic Lagrange (NLPQL) algorithm is adopted to implement the structure optimization. Moreover, the dynamic an alysis in ADAMS is achieved to design the drive trains of robotic arms. This method can uniformly evaluate all components of robotic arms in mass and continuously search the global optimal results. Finally, a design example on this unified design is compared with a referenced design to illustrate the validity and advantage of the proposed scheme.

In addition, the torque density curves are introduced in the potential analysis of lightweight robotic arms, such as high speed, heavy load and energy efficiency.

In the Q&A session, Dr. Yin and researchers have a good interaction about this talk.

Haibin Yin received his Ph.D. Degree in Human Mechanical System and Design from the Hokkaido University (HU), Japan in 2011, the M. Eng. and B. Eng. Degrees from University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB) in 2002 and 2008, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor at School of Mechanical and Electric Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology (WHUT), China. His research interests include dynamic and design, flexible robots, soft hands, and smart robots. He is a member of JSME and IEEE Robotics and Automation.

Xu Jingbo reports