Online and Modular Energy Consumption Optimization of Industrial Robots

Industrial robots contribute to a considerable amount of energy consumption in manufacturing. However, modeling the energy consumption of industrial robots is a complex problem as it requires considering components such as the robot controller, fans for cooling, the motor, the friction of the joints, and confidential parameters, and it is difficult to consider them all in modeling. Many authors investigated the effect of operating parameters on the energy consumption of industrial robots. However, there is no prescriptive methodology to determine those parameter values because of the challenges in the modeling of industrial robots. This article investigates an industrial robot and the manufacturing process together and proposes a black-box model-based energy consumption optimization approach. Our contribution to the research is the new online and data-efficient methodology, prescriptive algorithm, and the analysis of operating parameters' effects on industrial robots' energy consumption. The proposed methodology is tested using two real FANUC industrial robots in three industrial settings.