A systems design approach for the co-design of a humanoid robot arm

TL;DR

This paper presents a systematic top-down co-design approach for humanoid robot arms, enabling exploration of non-intuitive designs, decoupling morphology from control, and reducing development time through a structured solution space.

Contribution

It introduces a V-model based co-design methodology for humanoid robot arms, facilitating non-intuitive design exploration and parallel development.

Findings

Constructed a comprehensive solution space for robot arm design.

Decoupled robot morphology from control, increasing flexibility.

Reduced development time by enabling parallel subsystem design.

Abstract

Classically, the development of humanoid robots has been sequential and iterative. Such bottom-up design procedures rely heavily on intuition and are often biased by the designer's experience. Exploiting the non-linear coupled design space of robots is non-trivial and requires a systematic procedure for exploration. We adopt the top-down design strategy, the V-model, used in automotive and aerospace industries. Our co-design approach identifies non-intuitive designs from within the design space and obtains the maximum permissible range of the design variables as a solution space, to physically realise the obtained design. We show that by constructing the solution space, one can (1) decompose higher-level requirements onto sub-system-level requirements with tolerance, alleviating the "chicken-or-egg" problem during the design process, (2) decouple the robot's morphology from its controller, enabling greater design flexibility, (3) obtain independent sub-system level requirements, reducing the development time by parallelising the development process.