Optimal Robot Motion for Accelerated Life Testing of a 6-DoF Industrial Robot

Abstract

In order to verify the reliability of drive components for industrial robots, component-level life tests must be accompanied by a system-level life test using actual robots in which predefined robot motions are repeated throughout the test. To properly verify the durability of drive components through a system-level life test, it is important to design test modes so that the required test time is the same for all joint drive components of the robot, and it is necessary to design test modes with a high acceleration factor so as to shorten the required test time as much as possible. To solve this problem, the present research proposes a method for designing robot motions that makes the accelerated life test time for all the drive components of the robot equal. In particular, we solve a dynamic based motion optimization problem for an industrial 6-DoF (degrees-of-freedom) robot that minimizes the AM-GM (arithmetic mean to geometric mean) ratio of the acceleration factors of each joint. The results show that C2-continuous test modes with the same acceleration factor, which is inversely proportional to the cycle time of the robot motion, can be derived.

Keywords

• accelerated life testing
• acceleration factor
• reliability
• dynamic motion planning
• optimal robot motion