Smoothness-oriented motion planning method for milling robot considering workpiece set-up optimization

Robots are attracing increasing attention in the machining field owing to their great flexibility, vast workspace and low cost. Functional redundancy exists when robots are engaged in milling tasks. Redundancy resolution be considered not only in milling robot motion planning, but also in workpiece layout. A two-step motion planning method is proposed to optimize the trajectory and the workpiece set-up simultaneously to improve planning efficiency with less computational burden. In the first stage, a bilevel optimization technique is proposed that can plan the motion from a global perspective and search the optimal workpiece layout. In the second step, based on a novel smoothness index, a modified whale optimization algorithm combined with the differential evolution algorithm (DE-WOA) is proposed to resolve redundancy under robot and machining error constraints. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can enhance the quality of surface machining while avoiding the impact of path length on computational complexity.