AREUS — Innovative hardware and software for sustainable industrial robotics

Abstract

Industrial Robotics (IR) may be envisaged as the key technology to keep the manufacturing industry at the leading edge. Unfortunately, at the current state-of-the-art, IR is intrinsically energy intensive, thus compromising factories sustainability in terms of ecological footprint and economic costs. Within this scenario, this paper presents a new framework called AREUS, focusing on eco-design, eco-programming and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of robotized factories. The objective is to overcome current IR energetic limitations by providing a set of integrated technologies and engineering platforms. In particular, novel energy-saving hardware is firstly introduced, which aim at exchanging/storing/recovering energy at factory level. In parallel, innovative engineering methods and software tools for energy-focused simulation are developed, as well as energy-optimal scheduling of multi-robot stations. At last, LCA methods are briefly described, which are capable to assess both environmental and economic costs, linked to the flows of Material, Energy and Waste (MEW). A selected list of industrially-driven demonstration case studies is finally presented, along with future directions of improvement.

IoT solution approach for energy consumption reduction in buildings: part 2. Measurement setup and practical data analysis

“…For detailed statistical data analysis of the processes, the data from the placed electricity sensors were obtained with an interval of one minute, and compared to the readings of the central counter (see Fig.2.) and the data obtained by formula (1).…”

“…Every year, the amount of energy consumption in the world increases, therefore also need for new energy saving technologies becomes very popular. Also political decisions in terms of climate protection are closely related with energy-efficiency measures in various countries, where Germany has placed one of the highest targets to be reached, already implementing its "Energiewende" program in various sectors, like in industry introducing novel DC-Grids [1] and industrial robots as reused energy sources [2], as well as university campus grid infrastructure could be changed by implementing renewable energy systems, stationary storage, charging infrastructure [3]- [4]. The tendency shows that in future existing consumers will become prosumers, using a decentralised approach with the need to manage and measure electrical loads within each building.…”

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

“…Reconfigurable robots have been identified as a key technology to keep the manufacturing industry green Pellicciari et al (2015). Due to the fact that many of today's manufacturers are relying on robots in automating their product lines, improving green awareness of robots will subsequently lead to better green awareness of manufacturing Brossog et al (2015).…”

“…As such it can hardly be generalized to get a theoretical ground. In designing and adopting self-reconfigurable robotic systems, incorporating the design factors influencing the environment is important Ahmad and Babar (2016;Pellicciari et al (2015). From the perspective of empirical evidence, unpacking the influential factors in design and development of self-reconfigurable robots which subsequently positively/negatively contribute to improving green-awareness of manufacturing is hardly to find in the existing studies.…”

Power Measurement and Data Logger with High-Resolution for Industrial DC-Grid Application

“…The practical application of power meter unit has been done considering industrial DC microgrid as a case study scenario of intelligent power supply system. The concept of such innovative electrical infrastructure has been developed within AREUS project [14] considering 600 V DC voltage based energy distribution, recuperation, storage and exchange operation within manufacturing application. The principal structure of such system is presented in Fig.…”