Eco-programming of industrial robots for sustainable manufacturing via dynamic time scaling of trajectories

Nowadays, Industrial Robots (IRs) have become widespread in many manufacturing industries. Medium and high payload IRs cover a significant percentage of the overall factory Energy Consumption (EC). This article focuses on the IRs eco-programming to minimize the EC of a robot, being energy efficiency one of the fundamental aims of sustainable manufacturing. By leveraging well-known trajectory scaling methods, this research develops a novel, versatile, fast, and efficient process to define the IR optimal velocity/acceleration profile in time, keeping the geometry of the trajectory fixed. A complete IR system model that founds application in various types of 6 degrees of freedom articulated manipulators has been developed by considering electrical motors, actuator drive systems, and controller cabinet losses. A new optimization technique based on Dynamic Time Scaling of trajectories is presented, and the obtained results are compared with other methods used in the scientific literature. When performing critical path analysis, the EC of the robot system is estimated to be cut down, being the robot motion time fixed, by about 13% through this novel approach. The model has been validated through commercial software, and the proposed optimization algorithm has been implemented in a user-friendly interface tool.