Functional Co-Optimization of Articulated Robots
This addresses the challenge of robot design and motion planning for engineers, offering a method that integrates physical and motion optimization, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing trajectory optimization techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of designing more efficient articulated robots by simultaneously optimizing physical parameters and motion trajectories, resulting in making previously infeasible motion planning problems feasible and significantly reducing actuation requirements.
We present parametric trajectory optimization, a method for simultaneously computing physical parameters, actuation requirements, and robot motions for more efficient robot designs. In this scheme, robot dimensions, masses, and other physical parameters are solved for concurrently with traditional motion planning variables, including dynamically consistent robot states, actuation inputs, and contact forces. Our method requires minimal user domain knowledge, requiring only a coarse guess of the target robot configuration sequence and a parameterized robot topology as input. We demonstrate our results on four simulated robots, one of which we physically fabricated in order to demonstrate physical consistency. We demonstrate that by optimizing robot body parameters alongside robot trajectories, motion planning problems which would otherwise be infeasible can be made feasible, and actuation requirements can be significantly reduced.