A Computer-Aided Tool for the Energy Optimization of Industrial Robots in Manufacturing Applications

Nowadays, energy efficiency of industrial plants is an issue of primary concern. This research aims at minimizing the Energy Consumption (EC) of Industrial Manipulators (IMs) leveraging on Ecoprogramming strategies. In particular, building upon well-known methods for robot trajectory planning, a novel time-scaling approach is proposed, which employs a non-linear scaling function to better optimize EC. In this scenario, a Graphic User Interface (GUI) has been realized to ease the implementation of the presented algorithm, offering a fast and user-friendly tool to be used by robotic cell designers. Different manipulators models can be uploaded in the GUI to then automatically run the non-linear optimization process and retrieve a minimum-energy trajectory. As an instance, a 6 Degrees of Freedom IM has been considered; the obtained results have been compared with other methods known from the literature and validated through a commercial tool. The proposed method is verified to be more effective for energy-intensive trajectories, possibly reaching EC savings of more than 10%.