The Effect of Base Position on Maximum Allowable Load of Dual Arm Robots

  A new computational technique is presented to find the optimal base position of dual arm robots in order to carry maximum allowable load. The maximum allowable load on a desired trajectory is limited by the number of factors such as; actuators torque limits, kinematic constraints, and kinematic redundancy of cooperative manipulators. For a dual arm robot mounted on a rail or table, load workspace (LWS) is introduced as the union of places where the base can locate and robots carry a load on a desired trajectory. It is possible to increase the maximum allowable load by replacing the base of the arms robots in the LWS. By dividing the LWS into grid points, the base position of the rail mounted dual arm robot considered at each point. Using the Newton-Euler formulation and appropriate procedure, maximum allowable load of the robots in all points of the LWS are computed. Then, by iteration a smaller subspace near to optimum base position is selected until maximum allowable load and corresponding base position is found with acceptable precision. Finally, in two different cases the application of the proposed algorithm is presented and verified.