Structure-Actuation Co-Design of All-Electric Heavy-Duty Robotic Manipulators

Abstract

This paper presents a mixed discrete-continuous multiobjective bilevel framework for the structure-actuation co-design of all-electric heavy-duty robotic manipulators. The upper level optimizes manipulator geometry and actuation topology, while joint-specific lower-level searches construct feasible archives of discrete motor, gearbox, and screw configurations. A system-level coordinator selects actuator packages according to hardware mass, co-design cost, and loss-aware supply energy, and the resulting actuator masses are fed back to the robot model until a mass-consistent fixed point is obtained. Evaluation on a full-pose SE(3) benchmark with a 100-kg tool payload yields eight feasible nondominated designs, all satisfying the 12 prescribed poses. Actuator-mass coupling converges in three iterations for every reported design. A fixed-design ablation shows that one-pass sequential sizing changes hardware mass by up to 2.13%, co-design cost by 10.20%, and supply energy by 9.40% in magnitude. Payload screening further reveals increasing mass-cost-energy demand and changes in competitive mechanism topology with carried load.