A systems design approach for the co-design of a humanoid robot arm

Abstract: Classically, the development of humanoid robots has been sequential and iterative. Such bottom-up design procedures rely heavily on intuition and are often biased by the designer's experience. Exploiting the non-linear coupled design space of robots is non-trivial and requires a systematic procedure for exploration. We adopt the top-down design strategy, the V-model, used in automotive and aerospace industries. Our co-design approach identifies non-intuitive designs from within the design space and obtains the maximum permissible range of the design variables as a solution space, to physically realise the obtained design. We show that by constructing the solution space, one can (1) decompose higher-level requirements onto sub-system-level requirements with tolerance, alleviating the "chicken-or-egg" problem during the design process, (2) decouple the robot's morphology from its controller, enabling greater design flexibility, (3) obtain independent sub-system level requirements, reducing the development time by parallelising the development process.