When designing large-scale industrial manipulators, the selection of appropriate actuators is a crucial step. If selected incorrectly, the actuator may be “oversized” for its intended use, thus causing poor performance across the required range of operation, wasting money, and adding mass to the system unnecessarily. Alternatively, the actuator may end up being “undersized”, preventing the manipulator from performing as required, or causing damage through issues such as cavitation. To address this challenge, this project focuses on developing a means of selecting appropriate actuators depending on a manipulator’s requirements. To achieve this, the student will develop a suitable model of the manipulator, use this to simulate a range of manoeuvres that represent its intended operation, and extract the relevant data to recommend appropriate selections of hydraulic actuators. This process could then be used to devise a relationship between manipulator operating parameters (such as maximum payload and speed) and the appropriate selection of actuators. Depending on the student’s capabilities and interest in the subject, the latter stage of this project would be done either manually using MATLAB and/or Excel, or would use an alternative approach such as Fuzzy Logic.