Optimal Motions of a Welding Robot for Cooperative Tasks with a 2 DOF Positioner

Abstract

The application of cooperative positioner devices for industrial robotic workstations is becoming an interesting alternative. Such devices ease the accessibility of robots to tasks and increase their productivity. Thus, motion planning of robots working in cooperation with positioners becomes a noteworthy issue for corporations. Indeed, simultaneous and continuous motions of both the positioner and the robot should be suitably designed to increase the performance of the manufacturing system. In this paper, the simultaneous motions of a robot and a positioner table are synthesized such that a complex 3D welding seam is applied on a workpiece. The degree of freedom (DOF) of the considered robot and the cooperating table are 6 and 2, respectively. The applied strategy to obtain the joint trajectories of the system allows optimizing the kinematic performance of the robot during the execution of the task. Two indices of performance of robots are optimized: the translational and the rotational manipulabilities.