Reduction in robotic arm energy consumption by particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Improved energy usage efficiency is a common goal for economic and environmental reasons. In this manuscript, we present a new approach for the execution of a point-to-point robot motion. The energy efficiency of an industrial or collaborative robot is increased by the reduction of the energy consumption during nontechnological, path-independent movements. The novel trajectory generation method relies on particle swarm optimization with a Bezier curve interpolator. We present the effectiveness of the algorithm on several chosen trajectories, where the best result yields up to 40% energy saving, while the worst is still at least 10%. We verified the results of our method by real-world tests on a UR3 robotic arm.