ECDP: Energy Consumption Disaggregation Pipeline for Energy Optimization in Lightweight Robots

Limited resources and resulting energy crises occurring all over the world highlight the importance of energy efficiency in technological developments such as robotic manipulators. Efficient energy consumption of manipulators is necessary to make them affordable and spread their application in the future industry. Previously, the power consumption of the robot motion was the main factor considered in the evaluation of energy efficiency. Lately, the paradigm in industrial robotics shifted towards lightweight robot manipulators which require a new investigation on the disaggregation of robot energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline to identify and disaggregate the energy use of mechatronic devices and apply it to lightweight industrial robots. The proposed method allows the identification of the electronic components consumption, mechanical losses, electrical losses, and required mechanical energy for robot motion. We evaluate the pipeline and understand the distribution of energy consumption using four different manipulators, namely, Universal Robot's UR5e, UR10e, Franka Emika's FR3, and Kinova Gen3. The experimental results show that most of the energy (60% - 90%) is consumed by the electronic components of the robot control box. Using this knowledge, the approaches to further optimize their energy consumption need to shift towards efficient robot electronic design instead of efficient robot mass distribution or motion control. Finally, our disaggregation pipeline allows an understanding of the power consumption of any mechatronic device and thus enables deliberate optimization of energy consumption.