Optimal robot positioning for sustainable and energy efficient process execution

Abstract

Sustainable shop-floor is one of the key emphasis in Industry 5.0 1 . In Industry 4.0, automation played central role and this included usage of robots and other hardware for data generation and analysis which ultimately aimed at autonomously functioning shop-floor. Moving forward to Industry 5.0 energy efficient automation using robots is envisioned for a sustainable aircraft production. With an intent on generating digital twin model for cabin assembly this paper presents the simulation methodology for sustainable shop-floor process. DLR is working on implementing digital thread for the whole cabin lifecycle. The main aim of digital thread is to link the different stakeholders of the cabin lifecycle thereby time and energy efficient aircraft production is feasible. This work is part of the digital thread which aims at generating data based digital twin model for shop-floor processes. This paper demonstrates the feed-forward loop starting from simulation until the robot execution based on the KPI’s concerning energy consumption. The whole task is executed based on the robot assisted pre-assembly cell at the DLR-SL 4 . To begin with the probable locations of the robot for an inverse kinematics task are computed. Based on the reachability for different locations the dynamics of the robot and other external influences such as vibration and noise are taken into account and the trajectory planning is carried out for minimal energy consumption. The whole process is simulated and the computational outputs are stored in a database. An inference algorithm is then generated based on the computational data to evaluate any new task which will then provide the optimal location and the robot joint configuration for minimal energy consumption.