  Worldwide most factories aim for low-cost and fast production ignoring
resources and energy consumption. But, high revenues have been accompanied by
environmental degradation. The United Nations reacted to the ecological problem
and proposed the Sustainable Development Goals, and one of them is Sustainable
Production (Goal 12). In addition, the participation of lightweight robots,
such as collaborative robots, in modern industrial production is increasing.
The energy consumption of a single collaborative robot is not significant,
however, the consumption of more and more cobots worldwide is representative.
Consequently, our research focuses on strategies to reduce the energy
consumption of lightweight robots aiming for sustainable production. Firstly,
the energy consumption of the lightweight robot UR10e is assessed by a set of
experiments. We analyzed the results of the experiments to describe the
relationship between the energy consumption and the evaluation parameters, thus
paving the way to optimization strategies. Next, we propose four strategies to
reduce energy consumption: 1) optimal standby position, 2) optimal robot
instruction, 3) optimal motion time, and 4) reduction of dissipative energy.
The results show that cobots potentially reduce from 3\% up to 37\% of their
energy consumption, depending on the optimization technique. To disseminate the
results of our research, we developed an AR game in which the users learn how
to energy-efficiently program cobots.
