Simulation and Limited Redesign of a Counterbalanced Two Link Robotic Manipulator

Supplementary material for an ASME publication regarding limited redesign of mechatronic systems.

SimulateCBTwolink.m uses inverse dynamics to simulate the torque trajectories required for a counterbalanced two-link planar robotic manipulator to follow a prescribed trajectory. It also computes total energy consumption. This code is provided as supplementary material for the paper:

'Plant-Limited Co-Design of an Energy-Efficient Counterbalanced Robotic Manipulator'

Presented at the ASME 2012 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, August 2012, and submitted to the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design.

These papers are available from:

http://systemdesign.illinois.edu/publications.html

A video illustrating the motion of several design solutions investigated in this paper is available on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8YuTwxQlwM

This code was used in the solution of optimization problems described in the above paper, including problems that correspond to:

- sequential mechatronic design
- co-design for energy minimization (integrated plant and control design)
- co-design with limited plant redesign (for system repurposing)

The data for each case presented in the paper is provided so that plots of workspace trajectories and torque-speed curves can be reproduced.

Note: this code provides only analysis capability. No optimization code is included. Optimization implementations for the above paper require TOMLAB.

This submission is similar to file exchange submission 36213, except that:

- The manipulator in this simulation includes counterbalance mechanisms, increasing the complexity of the design problem.
- New PLCD procedures were developed to accomodate redesign problems where the baseline design cannot even be simulated for the new task.