The problem of robot selection has been of concern to manufacturers for many years. This problem has become more difficult in recent years due to increasing complexity, available features, and facilities offered by different robotic products. The objective of this research is to generate and maintain reliable and exhaustive database of robot manipulators based on their different pertinent attributes. This database can be used to standardize the robot selection procedure when the manufacturing firm has decided to use the robot for a particular operation. This will help the robot user to save time by providing him a tool for selecting the robot system most suited for his operational needs. The robot selection procedure allows rapid convergence from a very large number of candidate robots to a manageable shortlist of potentially suitable robots using,elimination search' based on the few critical selection attributes. Subsequently, the selection procedure proceeds to rank the alternatives in the shortlist by employing different attributes based specification methods and graphical methods. The ranks of the candidate robots are calculated with respect to the best possible robot, say +ve benchmark robot, for particular application. This ranking will provide a good guidance for the robot user to select the robot. It will also provide a good insight to the robot manufacturer so that he can improve his product or introduce new product to fulfill the need of customer. It will help the designer at various design stages, while the maintenance people can plan maintenance strategy to reduce the down time and maintenance efforts. This is an attempt to create exhaustive database by identifying maximum possible number of attributes for robot manipulators. The coding scheme and the selection procedures, mathematical and graphical, are illustrated with example. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
