Towards Integrated OR/CP Energy Optimization for Robot Cells

Paper in proceeding, 2014

This paper concerns the energy optimization of systems with interacting robots. Pseudo spectral optimal control is used to collocate the continuous time dynamics of each robot. The resulting model is a multi stage, multi robot, trajectory planning problem with timing constraints. In the case of a given task sequence, the mathematical formulation is that of a Nonlinear Programming problem. We present two example problems where three 3-DoF robots work together. For the case the problem consists of undetermined sequences, we outline an algorithm which integrates Operations Research methods with those of Constraint Programming.