Högskolan i Skövde

Concern about limited energy resources extend to politicians, academia and industry who pursue the efficient use of energy. Part of this is due to that society is becoming increasingly sensitive to the environmental impact. The advance in process simulation and digital twin's technologies allows the creation of virtual models that simulate accurately real systems. The question investigated throughout this paper is: what is the best configuration and time sequence for a robot to minimise energy consumption? In this case, a virtual model that replicates a production cell and an optimisation Add-in are used to analyse and optimise the energy consumption of a robot application. The impact on energy consumption of various aspect as timing or acceleration of the robot is studied.

All experiments have been compared with a reference case, called base case, then different scenarios havebeen created.

As a conclusion, it has been demonstrated that when the time constraints of the production process allows therobot to work at lower velocity and acceleration, energy will be reduced. This improvement in energy consumption come at a cost, reducing production throughput of the production cell.