Optimal Motion Planning and Layout Design in Robotic Cellular Manufacturing Systems

A multi-objective optimization algorithm is proposed in this paper for motion planning and layout design in robotic cellular manufacturing systems. The sequence-pair is used to represent the layout of a robotic cell, which can avoid the overlapping of modules. For each layout, the robot motion planning using Rapidly exploring Random Trees (RRT) is conducted to compute the total operation time. A non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) is used to minimize the layout area and operation time. The proposed method is applied to a 6-DOF (Degree of Freedom) robot manipulator, Niryo Ned. In the experiments, a Pareto set is obtained. The experimental results suggest the tradeoff relationship between the operation time and layout area. The findings show that the proposed method can efficiently solve the optimal motion planning and layout design problem in robotic cellular manufacturing systems.