Industrial Cloud Robotics Towards Sustainable Manufacturing

Abstract

Cloud Robotics (CR) is the combination of Cloud Computing and Robotics, which encapsulate resources related with robots as services and is also the robotics’ next stage of development. Under this background, due to the characteristics of convenient access, resource sharing and lower costs, industrial cloud robotics (ICR) is proposed to integrate the industrial robots resources in the worldwide to provide ICR services in worldwide. ICR also plays an important role in improving the productivity of manufacturing. In the manufacturing field, Cloud Manufacturing (CM) and Sustainable Manufacturing (SM) is the developing orientation of future manufacturing industry. The energy consumption optimization of ICR is the crucial issue for manufacturing sustainability. However, currently, ICR systems are not programmed efficiently, which leads to the increase of production costs and pollutant emissions. Thus, it is an actual problem to optimize the energy consumption of ICR. In this paper, in order to achieve the goal of energy consumption optimization in worldwide range, the framework of ICR towards sustainable manufacturing is presented, as well as its enabling methodologies, and it is used to support energy consumption optimization services of ICR in the Cloud environment. This framework can be used to support energy-efficient services related with ICR to realize sustainable manufacturing in the worldwide range.