Green Robotics: concepts, challenges, and strategies

Green initiatives aim to transform products and processes in order to become friendlier with the environment protection. These concepts are well spread in areas as Chain Supply Management and Computing with several researches worldwide about them. However in the area of Robotics this relevant theme has not being well addressed, with some sporadic and isolated works. Actually, to date, we noticed in the literature the lack of concepts and investigations specifically directed to Green Robotics. Towards this direction, overcome these challenges, this work proposes a formalism on how this concept should be treated in Robotics coming up with an approach in order to allow the adoption of a methodology that can be followed, starting with robot construction and programming until the execution of tasks, all respecting environmental concerns. We show the relationship between concepts that are common in Green Supply Chains, Green Computing, and Green Robotics. Besides, we put examples of strategies that are often used to allow sustainability in Robotics and the types of metrics that can be used to verify them. Finally, math formalism for Green Robotics is introduced, in which the several related issues are approached as a multicriteria optimization problem. The applicability is exemplified through an activity scenario of Educational Robotics.