Task-Dependent Structural Modifications on Reconfigurable General Serial Manipulators

The monolithic design of serial robot arms has become widely accepted in industrial applications. One might note that these manipulators are designed in such a way that they can implement as many applications as possible at the same time and therefore do usually not have an application-specific structure. In this article we describe the construction and modeling of a kinematic chain in which a mechanical modification is possible. As a result, the structure of a serial robot can be adapted in a wide range. For this purpose, the links of the kinematic chain are modified in such a way that the robot structure matches the desired Denavit-Hartenberg parameter set. This means also that optimizations with different kinematic goals can be realized in order to flexibly adapt the robot system to a current task.