Minimizing Energy Consumption for Robot Arm Movement

Robots are widely used in industry due to their efficiency and high performance. Many of them are operating in the manufacturing stage of the production line where the highest percentage of energy is consumed. Therefore, their energy consumption became a major focus for many robots manufacturers and academic research groups. Nevertheless, the optimization of that consumption is still a challenging task which requires a deep understanding of the robot's kinematic and dynamic behaviors. This paper proposes an approach to develop an optimization module using Matlab® to minimize the energy consumptions of the robot's movement. With the help of Denavit-Hartenberg notation, the approach starts first by solving the inverse kinematics of the robot to find a set of feasible joint configurations required to perform the task, solving the inverse kinematics is usually a challenging step which requires in-depth analyses of the robot. The module then solves the inverse dynamics of the robot to analyze the forces and torques applied on each joint and link in the robot. Furthermore, a calculation for the energy consumption is performed for each configuration. The final step of the process represents the optimization of the calculated configurations by choosing the one with the lowest power consumption and sends the results to the robot controller. Three case studies are used to evaluate the performance of the module. The experimental results demonstrate the developed module as a successful tool for energy efficient robot path planning. Further analyses for the results have been done by comparing them with the ones from commercial simulation software. The case studies show that the optimization of the location for the target path could reduce the energy consumption effectively.