Abstract
Nowadays the reduction of the energy-consumption has become a key factor to face the rising of energy costs and to reduce the environmental issues (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions responsible of global warming). In manufacturing industries, robotics and automated system have a great impact on the processes global energy consumption, as well as they have a direct influence on the scale, the speed, the quality and the cost of the production. Moreover, in the last years the use of mechatronic systems is spreading also in secondary fields (e.g. agri-forest field, medicine, home automation, etc.). Thus, this awareness drove engineers and scientists to find out new methodologies and technologies to save energy without affect the systems performance. For this reason, this PhD thesis focuses the attention on the study and investigation of methods, techniques and technologies able to reduce the energy consumption of generic mechatronic multi-body systems, without affecting their performances. These methods are applicable both to simple and widespread systems, such as elevators, conveyors, or cranes, as well as to complex ones (e.g. industrial manipulators). In the first part of the work, a new method where both regenerative systems and point-to-point motion planning techniques are exploited to reduce the energy consumption in generic 1-DoF mechatronic systems is presented. This approach allows to find an analytical closed-form solution of the minimum energy problem for different motion primitives and, in particular, for the ones commonly implemented in mechatronic drives. In the second part, the natural motion approach has been investigated and improved to increase the energetic-e ciency of multi-DoF systems performing cyclic repetitive tasks (e.g. pick-and-place operations, palletizing, etc.), thanks to the integration of compliant elements. The developed methodologies have been numerically and experimentally validated both on simple and complex test-cases.