Automatic Design of Task-specific Robotic Arms
This work addresses the need for efficient, task-specific robotic arm design, though it appears incremental as it builds on modular and reconfigurable part libraries without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of designing custom robotic arms for specific tasks by developing an interactive computational system that generates functional, minimal robot arms from modular parts to track desired end-effector trajectories, demonstrated through simulations.
We present an interactive, computational design system for creating custom robotic arms given high-level task descriptions and environmental constraints. Various task requirements can be encoded as desired motion trajectories for the robot arm's end-effector. Given such end-effector trajectories, our system enables on-demand design of custom robot arms using a library of modular and reconfigurable parts such as actuators and connecting links. By searching through the combinatorial set of possible arrangements of these parts, our method generates a functional, as-simple-as-possible robot arm that is capable of tracking the desired trajectories. We demonstrate our system's capabilities by creating robot arm designs in simulation, for various trajectory following scenarios.