Optimizing industrial robot motion powered by renewable sources

Abstract

Industrial robots have been widely used in manufacturing automation. To make the robot manufacturing green and sustainable, it is ideal to use renewable energy. Because the renewable energy generation depends on weather, it is challenging to control the robot motion according to the generated power. This paper analyzes the energy consumption of industrial robots and presents a method to plan the robot motion based on renewable energy generation. Because the generated renewable power is random, the robot motion should be planned according to the randomly generated power. In this paper, the robot power and energy consumption is measured and analyzed. It quickly became clear that while the peak power is higher at higher velocities in fact the energy consumption over the duration of the cycle is much lower. An optimal robot motion planning method based on the generated renewable power is then proposed. Experiments were performed to validate the proposed method and the results show that the optimal use of the generated renewable power can be achieved by varying the robot velocity.