A practical and integrated method to optimize a manipulator-based inspection system

A method to minimize the working time of a 6-DOF robot arm in inspecting products is presented. It involves subdividing one large complex problem into several sub- problems. There are three issues considered: (1) the base position of robot arm (2) the order of product parts to be inspected called inspection points and (3) the heat generated in joint motors. The proposed method used the Tabu search (TS) to find optimal base position and the Lin-Kernighan (LK) method to optimize the order of inspection points. The end-effector trajectory is based on trapezoidal velocity method (TVP) with heat constraint, which prevents overheating the robot arm joints. The proposed method is proved effective through simulation and is useful for actual application in manufacturing industries.