Model for energy consumption of 2D Belt Robot : Master’s thesis work

Abstract: A production industry with many robots working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week consumes a lot of energy. Industries aim to reduce the energy consumed per machine so as to support their financial budgets and also to be a more sustainable, energy efficient entity. Energy models can be used to predict the energy consumed by robot(s) for optimising the input parameters which determine robot motion and task execution. This work presents an ener-gy model to predict the energy consumption of 2D belt robots used for press line tending. Based on the components' specifications and the trajectory, an estimation of the energy consumption is computed. As part of this work, the proposed energy model is formulated, implemented in MATLAB and experimentally validated. The energy model is further used to investigate the effect of tool weight on energy consumption which includes predicting potential energy reductions achieved by reducing the weight of the gripper tools. Further, investigation of potential energy savings which can be achieved when mechanical brakes are used when the robot is idle is also presented. This illustrates the purpose and usefulness of the proposed energy model.