Swedish research maps industrial robot routes to save energy

Industrial robots' energy consumption can be cut by up to 40 percent by reducing their need to stop and accelerate, Swedish researchers said on Monday.

Robots whose movement is planned ahead of time and conducted at a slower pace neither stand still nor stop and start as much, thereby saving a significant amount of energy, Chalmers University of Technology said in a press release.

"We simply let the robot move slower instead of waiting for other robots and machines to catch up before carrying out the next sequence," said Bengt Lennartsson, one of the researchers involved in the study.

Although the robots tested in the study move at a slower pace, the time they took to execute a task did not increase, Lennartsson said.

The optimization tool analyzes the route and potential collision zones for the robot before it begins to move and uses the information to map out a path during which it is less likely to have to stop or break sharply.

The study, conducted for an EU research project with the support of companies such as General Motors, were due to be presented at a conference in Gothenburg this week.

"The goal is to make this kind of optimization standard, and included in robots from the start," said Kristofer Bengtsson, another researcher involved in the project.

In heavily automated industries, robots consume about half of the total energy used for production, the researchers said.