Tobias Wellerdieck

The need for increased productivity and lower cost are driving the growth of robotics in various industries. In the past the push for robotic automation was mostly constrained to industries with well-defined challenges in controlled environments such as manufacturing industry and automated logistics. The nature of the applications allows for straightforward, top-down optimization of the robotic application and its subsystems. Although being complex in nature, the resulting requirements for drive systems are often defined as part of a portfolio. The customer selects the appropriate drive solution in terms of cost, efficiency, power, precision, etc. Today, robotics is entering new markets with weakly defined problem sets and a broad spectrum of possible environment conditions. Examples of this trend are mobile robots in inspection and agriculture, collaborative robots and medical robots for assisted living and rehabilitation. Developing solutions for these applications leads to multi-objective optimization problems with higher complexity compared to classical applications. Top-down optimization approaches are rendered obsolete because of increasingly important two-way interactions across system layers. Robotic system developers and drive system suppliers benefit from close cooperation to achieve the holistic optimization of the application including its drive system. This contribution outlines the challenges of novel robotic applications and shows how drive systems as a sub-system are impacted. Our approach of integrating component and robotic application models into a single, holistic drive system optimization methodology is shown in detail. A focus is put on how the cooperation of system integrator and sub-system supplier is changing with our approach. Lastly, we provide insight into how the development of classical applications also benefits from the holistic optimization methodology.