Recuperated energy savings potential and approaches in industrial robotics

Abstract

This paper presents the experimental and simulation results of industrial robot's recuperated energy saving approaches. Two complementary alternatives- a capacitive energy buffer on the robot's DC-bus is evaluated and a novel approach, the robot EnergyTeam has been proposed. The principle of robot EnergyTeam is the DC-bus merging among various number of industrial robot power controllers thus enabling a controlled energy flow among the robots that decelerate and, therefore, recuperate the energy and those that simultaneously require a peak power supply for the acceleration. Cost efficiency is estimated considering the characteristics in robotics of real production in the automobile industry.