Solidworks parameterization for industrial robot design

Abstract

Development of Industrial robots is becoming more expensive and time consuming over the years. A lot of costs are spent in the development, and so it is necessary to improve the conceptual design phase. This thesis is an object lesson that shows one of the multiple ways to improve the named phase. It basically consists on, using a CAD program, build a robot whose parameters have to be modified from a user interface. The parameters to change are the dimensions of the robot’s parts (morphology parameterization) and also the parts to use (topology parameterization), which can be chosen from a large library of different parts. Some parameters are changed so as the build robot has similar mass properties to a given one, in order to be able to do some tests with it and export the results to improve the real robot. For this reason, in the interface done there is also written some code to get the mass properties of the built robot. Even so, this thesis only shows how to do the named actions but it has not been done any kind of test.