Energy-Efficient Motion Planning for Electrical Drives

The energy consumed over a limited operation time of an electrical drive has a huge impact on the energy consumption in a production line, and therefore, affects directly the economics of a factory or company. Although polynomial interpolation with cubic, quartic or quintic polynomials has been widely used in the literature for motion planning purposes, these polynomials have also some major drawbacks. One of these drawbacks is an insufficient smooth trajectory profile. The other problem is not having adequate equations to solve the problem of using seventh-order polynomials for pre-specified positions, velocities, accelerations and jerks in every specified control points or time intervals during the desired path. Instead, seventh-order or higher-order-polynomials are used to satisfy more boundary conditions to overcome the problem of specifying desired position, velocity, acceleration and jerk at the specified control points. Another method that is used for the trajectory planning, is to use spline interpolation polynomials. A comparison between different methods will be done, and their impact on the overall energy consumption of the system will be discussed.