Optimal Design of Lightweight Machines Using Flexible Multibody System Dynamics

In many machine and robotic applications energy efficiency is an increasingly crucial issue. In order to achieve energy efficiency lightweight structural designs are necessary. However, undesired elastic deformations might occur due to the light wight design. In order to achieve good system performance the actual dynamic loads must be taken into account in the design of the system’s components. In this paper optimization approaches for lightweight machine designs are employed to improve the tracking behavior the systems. Thereby, fully dynamical simulations of flexible multibody systems are coupled with both shape or topology optimization for the elastic members of the multibody system. It is shown, that by these approaches the end-effector trajectory tracking error of light wight manipulators can be decreased significantly.