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Emerging application areas, such as safe robotics and green robotics, greatly enable the extension of robot automation to new application processes in different industry segments. Successful realization of industrial robots for such application areas is highly influenced by the type of robot structure that is adopted for the design. Therefore, researchers have recently pursued new robot structures with improved characteristics resulting in the current availability of a wide variety of potential robot structures from which to choose.

Along with this, a difficult yet relevant challenge arises for robot designers to evaluate all the potential robot structures to select the best structure for new applications. This necessitates a need for tools or methods, which can aid robot designers or end-users to perform evaluation on robot structures in the early design stages. The research objective pursued in this thesis aims to address this need. To realize this objective, design knowledge must be advanced on ways or methods to quantitatively evaluate robot structures.

This project adopts research through design as a research methodology, which is based on the action-reflection approach. In this thesis, experiential knowledge is gained on how to evaluate a set of two robot structures based on various requirements. This is done by carrying out simulation-based evaluation tasks on serial and parallelogram linkage articulated robot structures. Based on the acquired experiential knowledge, a simulation-based evaluation framework is proposed in this thesis, which can be used by robot designers or end-users to enhance the likelihood of selecting the most suitable robot structure for a new application process.

In order to develop robot automation for new market sectors associated with short product lifetimes and frequent production change overs, industrial robots must exhibit a new level of flexibility and versatility. This situation has led to the growing interest in making humans and robots share their working environments and sometimes even allowing direct physical contact between the two in order to make them work cooperatively on the same task by enabling human-industrial robot collaboration (HIRC). In this context, it is very important to evaluate both the performance and the inherent safety characteristics associated with a given industrial robot manipulator system in HIRC workstation during the design and development stages.

This necessitates a need to formulate evaluation methods with relevant design metrics and quantitative methods based on simulations, which can support the robot mechanical designer to correlate the task-, and safety- based performance characteristics of industrial robot mechanical system for HIRC applications. The research objective perused in this research aiming to address this need.

This research project adopts research methodology based on action-reflection approach in a collaborative research setting between academia and industry. The design knowledge is gained on how to evaluate a specific industrial robot mechanical system design for usability in a specific collaborative application with humans. This is done by carrying out simulation-based evaluation tasks to measure and subsequently analyze the task-, and safety- based performance characteristics of industrial robot mechanical systems. Based on the acquired knowledge, an evaluation methodology with relevant design metrics and simulation modelling approaches is proposed in this research which integrates simulation based design processes of both Human-industrial robot workstation as well as robot mechanical system in order to make a well-grounded assessment on whether the robot mechanical system fulfills the task- and safety-based performance requirements corresponding to a specific collaborative application.