Increasing the Energy Efficiency of Robotic Workplaces

Like other industrial sectors, the robotics industry is pressured to reduce energy consumption while maintaining production efficiency. In addition to the economic benefits, reducing consumption also reduces the carbon footprint of production. While reducing consumption by changing mechanical structures and restructuring production lines can be beneficial, it reduces the versatility of robotic workplaces and is time-consuming. Our proposed solution reduces the energy consumption of the robotic workstation based on the optimal placement of the work object in the robotic cell. In this case, the optimization process is simulated on an industrial robot software platform. The result of the optimization is the determination of the most energy-optimal position for the placement of the work object. In experiments, it was found that up to 71.8% of the energy consumption of the 6-DOF industrial robot can be saved by this approach. The correlation between the simulated and real workplace tasks was also verified.