Global optimal design of dynamic parameters of robot manipulators

In this paper we deal with a global optimal design of dynamic parameters of robot manipulators. The dynamic characteristic of robot manipulators is uniquely determined by base parameters, which are functions of physical parameters, e.g., the mass, the moment of inertia and the damping of each link, etc.. Using the fact that the equation of motion of manipulators generally becomes an affine function on the base parameters we propose an LMI based global optimal design of the base parameters of robot manipulators. In this paper we obtain the global optimal base parameters minimizing the required energy to achieve a given task (given by the reference trajectory of the end-effector). We adopt the computed torque method as the control law for the robot manipulators. The proposed design method guarantees the global optimality of the optimized base parameters. As a design example an optimal design of the base parameters of planar two link manipulator is presented.