Enhanced Concept-Based Exploration of Manipulators’ Design Spaces with Kinematics, Dynamics and Control Co-Design

Determining the parameters of a manipulator for optimal performance is a challenging task. This is primarily due to possible conflicting objectives, various tasks that should be considered, and the highly non-linear behavior that is involved. This work proposes an enhanced version of the concept-based design space exploration (C-DSE) approach for the design of manipulators. According to the C-DSE approach, prior to the search, the designers divide the set of feasible solutions into meaningful subsets, which are termed concepts. The design space exploration involves a simultaneous search for optimal solutions within each of the pre-defined concepts. This enhanced framework integrates the following: (1) kinematics, dynamics, and control co-design, and the simultaneous optimization of manipulator morphology and controller parameters; (2) surrogate-assisted optimization using Gaussian process (GP) and neural network (NN) models to reduce computational cost; (3) approximately 30 performance metrics spanning kinematic, dynamic, structural, control, and task performance domains; (4) task-aware feasibility verification applying a multi-level hierarchy; (5) a generative AI integration pathway using diffusion models and LLM-guided concept generation (proposed in this preliminary investigation). The results demonstrate a 95.7% reduction in high-fidelity function evaluations (50,000 to 2150), corresponding to a 23.3 times reduction in evaluation count and a 6.6 times reduction in wall-clock computation time (25 h to 3.8 h). Co-design yields up to a 35% improvement in energy efficiency and a 28% reduction in tracking error compared to sequential morphology-only optimization.