Inventive Approaches to Competitive Systems Engineering - Is There Anything New Under the Sun?

Abstract

workshop. The results showed that GA provided a better solution than PSO in terms of the total travelled distance, while PSO yielded faster. The layout optimization was applied in the case of eight facilities. The seventh paper is entitled “Preliminary Study of End-Effector Compliance for Reducing Insertion Force in Automated Fluid Coupling for Trains”. It presents the work and results of Kourosh Eshraghi, Jiang, Daniele Suraci, and Mark Atherton. In my reading, inventiveness originated here in matching practical experiments and rational considerations. The authors started out from the observation that the literature does not propose dedicated solutions for handling large misalignments of the passive end-effector in such applications as a robot end-effector for train fluid servicing. The end-effector compliance was supposed to be the key to a successful alignment. The authors applied a hybrid approach (combining physical experiments and numerical modeling/simulations) to investigate the magnitude of the insertion forces during misaligned couplings. The conducted physical experiments showed that large insertion forces might be required even in the case of small misalignments. A kind of digital twin was formed by the physical set up and the simulation model. The latter captured the configurable parameters for robot compliance and peg-in-hole friction, and was informed by the results of the physical experiments. The numerical simulation model was calibrated based on the results of the physical experiments. It was shown that the characteristic insertion force curve obtained with the calibrated simulation model was a truthful representative of what could be measured in the physical experiments. Thus, it can reduce the physical efforts and labor that is needed for the testing of end-effectors. However, the testing of the calibrated simulation model for other robot and misalignment configurations showed greater error, suggesting that the model can be used only for the calibrated configuration.