Decision Support System for Selecting Robot Systems for Pick-and-place Operation of Robot Manipulator

In recent years, robots have been introduced to production sites due to the shortage of manpower. As a result, there is a need to reduce the costs of robot systems. Conventional research has focused on the optimization of robot configuration and motion planning, In this study, we propose a decision support system for the selection of equipment for robots, hands, and workpieces in a transfer system. Given information on the length and payload of each element, the problem of selecting equipment that minimizes the sum of the costs of these three elements is formulated as an integer programming problem. The system considers various conditions necessary for equipment selection, such as physical constraints and reachability of the robot end-effector to the workpiece, and expresses the grasp availability of the workpiece, payload, and reachability of the robot as inequality constraints. Using the proposed system, the optimal solution was obtained in the computational experiments.