Proposed in this paper is a method for the structural analysis and optimal design of industrial robots based on the softwares of Adams and Ansys.In this method,first,the finite element analysis is used to reveal the static and dynamic performances of the robot,so as to find out its weak parts and the weak positions of its main parts.Then,the weak parts and positions are topologically and dimensionally optimized,thus obtaining a set of Pareto solution.Finally,the proposed method is applied to an industrial robot.The results show that the optimized robot achieves a total static deformation decrement of 78.1% and a first- order natural frequency improvement of 49.6% at the cost of a mass increment of only 6%,which indicates that the proposed method is effective and feasible.