Towards optimal design, trajectories and control for repetitive movements.

There is a strong desire to maximize the efficiency or speed of industrial machinery. Designers of machines, performing repetitive motions, often only define the position start- and endpoint of a movement and not the exact position function. This flexibility opens the opportunity to optimize the trajectory of the mechanism. Moreover, for the machine design itself, machine builders often rely on standard components and dimensions. The effect of the geometric design on the optimal trajectory and energy need of the system is very often neglected. The literature mentions cases where ad-hoc optimizations reduce energy usage up to 39% thanks to trajectory and geometric optimization. This project will use available CAD models and sparse interpolation to extract a closed mathematical system property description. This will enable using an interval optimization technique which can guarantee to find the one true global optimal geometric design and trajectory. The knowledge of the system properties will be used to design a robust controller to ensure the machine follows the desired trajectory. Finally, any mismatch between the virtual and real model will be detected with online tracking techniques to assure the machine operation remains optimal. The potential impact for machine builders is high as this project enables them to construct machines with a reduced total cost of ownership or allow them to perform a task as fast as possible purely based on their readily available CAD models.

Keywords:MOTION CONTROL

Disciplines:Control engineering, Motion planning and control

Project type:Collaboration project