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.