Robot location for minimum cycle time

Increasing the productivity of automated manufacturing cells is one of today's management's top priorities. The large amounts of capital invested in these ventures have lead many researchers to investigate methods to increase the utilization of such systems. In this paper, we address the problem of finding the robot location in a manufacturing cell that minimizes the execution time of its assigned tasks. Minimizing the robot cycle time leads to increased productivity in several industrial applications. In our approach, the robot geometric structure and specifications are considered in developing models using Inverse Kinematics to determine the traveling times between the different tasks of a particular manufacturing cell. Then, an optimization scheme is introduced to find the robot base location that minimizes its cycle time.