Optimum design of 3R robot manipulador by using Improved Differential Evolution implemented in parallel computation

Abstract

In recent decades the great interest in Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) has boosted their development leading to a significant improvement in their efficiency and applicability. Thus, EAs have been applied to solve optimization problems in different areas of knowledge. A promising optimization method known as Differential Evolution (DE), which belongs to the class of AEs, has attracted the attention of researchers. The DE algorithm is simple, robust and efficient. However, by testing with classical optimization problems noticed that sometimes the results obtained with DE are not as satisfactory as expected or that in many cases the algorithm ends the search for the optimal solution prematurely. Recently, with the advancement and greater availability of computer technology, the scientific community has been thinking about the implementation of optimization algorithms in parallel in order to reduce the processing time. The main objective of this paper is to present an improvement of the Differential Evolution optimization method, proposing modifications to the basic algorithm by using shuffled complex and making it able to work with parallel computing. The proposed methodology is applied to the optimal design of an orthogonal 3R robot manipulator that takes into account the characteristics of its workspace. For this purpose, a multi-objective optimization problem is formulated to obtain the optimal geometric parameters for the robot. The maximum workspace volume, the maximum system stiffness and the optimum dexterity are considered as the multi-objective functions. The results show that the procedure represents a promising alternative for the type of problem presented above.