8. Resource Efficiency Calculation as a Cloud Service

Optimising the energy consumption of robot movements has been one of the main focuses for most of today’s robotic simulation software. This optimisation is based on minimising a robot’s joints movements. In many cases, it does not take into consideration the dynamic features. Therefore, reducing energy consumption is still a challenging task and it involves studying the robot’s kinematic and dynamic models together with application requirements. This chapter explains how to minimise the robot energy consumption during assembly. Given a trajectory and based on the inverse kinematics and dynamics of a robot, a set of attainable configurations for the robot can be determined, perused by calculating the suitable forces and torques on the joints and links of the robot. The energy consumption is then calculated for each configuration and based on the assigned trajectory. The ones with the lowest energy consumption are selected. Given that the energy-efficient robot configurations lead to reduced overall energy consumption, this approach becomes instrumental and can be wrapped as a cloud service for energy-efficient robotic assembly.