A Methodology for Evaluating Energy-Efficiency of Different Robot Structures

Evaluation of different robot structures is a difficult but relevant challenge. Providing tools and methods to allow robot designers or end-users to quantitatively compare robot structures is necessary because the variety of existing robot structures makes it hard to choose which one is the best suited for a specific task or for a new application process. This paper proposes a methodology for evaluating a set of two robot structures at a time in order to select the best structure among them for a new application process. As a proof of concept this method is applied to evaluate two anthropomorphic robot structures, one with and one without parallel linkage transmission. The evaluation is done on the basis of finding the best robot structure, which while fulfilling a set of process-based performance requirements (End-effector motion parameters) should demonstrate better energy efficiency characteristics for applicability in emerging application areas of green robotics.