Sizing up Energy Consumption in Lightweight Robots: A Comprehensive Assessment

The United Nations established the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to foster a sustainable society, requiring industries to adapt their production methods accordingly. Two specific objectives from the SDGs are of particular relevance to industries: SDG11, which focuses on sustainable cities and communities, and SDG12, which emphasizes responsible consumption and production. Optimizing the energy consumption of assets crucial to modern industry, such as lightweight robots and collaborative robots, is of the essence to accomplish these objectives. In this paper, we introduce an energy-semantic model that analyzes the energy consumption performance of anthropomorphic serial manipulators. We propose four performance test experiments to assess the robot’s energy consumption under different scenarios. Subsequently, we implement this methodology in a case study involving the collaborative robot UR3e. The results delineate the relationship between energy consumption and various evaluation parameters, including joint configurations, joint temperatures, payload, movement commands, acceleration limits, velocity limits, and trajectory planning. This analysis paves the way for developing energy optimization strategies, such as repositioning the robot to a joint configuration with less gravitational torque during extended idle periods or utilizing Point to Point commands for fast movements and Cartesian linear commands for slower ones.