Simulation and Limited Redesign of a Two Link Robotic Manipulator

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

SimulateTwolink.m uses inverse dynamics to simulate the torque trajectories required for a 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:

'Engineering System Co-Design with Limited Plant Redesign'

Presented at the 8th AIAA Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Specialist Conference, April 2012.

The paper is available from:

http://systemdesign.illinois.edu/publications/All12a.pdf

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR7Y9-n5SjA

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.