A study of influential factors in designing self-reconfigurable robots for green manufacturing

Abstract

There is incremental growth in adopting self-reconfigurable robots in automating manufacturing conventional product lines. Using this class of robots adapting themselves with ever-changing environmental conditions has been acclaimed as a promising way of reducing energy consumption and environmental impact and thus enabling green manufacturing. Whilst the majority of existing research focuses on highlighting the efficacy of self-reconfigurable robots in energy reduction with technical driven solutions, the research on exploring the salient factors in design and development selfreconfigurable robots that directly enable or hinder green manufacturing is non-extant. This interdisciplinary research contributes to the nascent body of the knowledge by empirical investigation of design-time, run-time, and hardware aspects which should be contingently balanced when developing green-aware self-reconfigurable robots.