Breaking Down the Energy Consumption of Industrial and Collaborative Robots: A Comparative Study

Industrial robots have been widely used in diverse activities and industries for more than six decades. However, these robots were initially designed to operate autonomously without human interaction. The emergence of a new generation of manipulators, namely lightweight robots such as collaborative robots, has revolutionized the industry by enabling robots to work alongside humans. In this paper, we qualitatively compare the energy consumption of these two types of robots. First, we propose experimental setups to investigate how specific variables, such as standstill position, motion commands, velocity and acceleration limits, time scaling, and joint temperatures, influence the energy consumption of a Cobot, namely, UR3e. Then, UR3e results are compared to IR experimental results which are mainly based on existing literature. The comparison reveals that the energy signature graph, which depicts the energy consumption versus execution time, differs between these two robots. Furthermore, industrial robots consume a considerably larger amount of mechanical energy compared to their electronic components' energy, while UR3e consumes a higher proportion of energy in their electronic components. Energy optimization strategies for UR3e should focus on efficient electronic design, such as the distribution of computation tasks among system assets, rather than reducing energy consumption through motion planning.