Ecological responsibility
As an industrial company, KUKA wants to make a measurable contribution to the reduction of environmental pollution. For this, we are making a start in our own company: we are cutting our consumption of energy and other resources, lowering our emissions and reducing our quantities of waste.Moreover thanks to their efficiency, KUKA robots and systems help our customers to save costs, while at the same time contributing to the conservation of resources and combating climate change.
Environmental
issues (e.g. energy consumption in production, but also waste and water
management) are continuously taken into account and evaluated by us. Energy consumption gives rise to CO₂
emissions. With our certified environmental and energy management systems,
we ensure that negative impacts of our energy consumption are kept as low as
possible and continuously minimized.
Energy-efficient robots and systems are an
important lever for reducing energy consumption in our customers’ applications.
In our own research and
development as well as in cooperation with renowned partners from industry and
research, we systematically address customer requirements and are continuously
working on solutions with the objective of reducing consumption still further.
With technical means such as an optimized energy model in the case of
newly developed robots, the upgrading of welding processes, preconfigured
“ready2_use” applications and large-scale automation solutions for
warehouse logistics, we have recently launched groundbreaking innovations
that reduce the energy consumption of our products. In 2020, we
also launched innovations that support energy-efficient production, such as the
KR IONTEC, the KR
SCARA and the KR
C5 robot controller.
KUKA
additionally offers customers tailored complete solutions for automating
manufacturing processes, covering all activities from planning and design
through
to the
implementation of automated production systems. The expertise lies in
automating individual production processes such as welding and joining,
processing various materials and integrating different production stages to form
a fully automatic system. Here, KUKA is able to offer its customers alternative energy-efficient
solutions.
Additionally,
KUKA implements automation solutions for forward-looking warehouses and
distribution centers. The business segment Swisslog offers data-driven and
robotbased automation – from small entry-level automation systems to turnkey
logistics solutions. Swisslog has created its own energy efficiency label
called GreenLog
for its customers. This is because energy consumption is an important criterion
in complex logistics applications with many individual automated processes.
Noticeable
savings can be achieved by improving energy management for entire plants or
subsystems. For example, the power requirement peaks that occur when shuttles
or stacker cranes start to move can be considerably reduced by sequencing the
start times. Brake energy regeneration can also be used to reduce power
requirement peaks at the start of motion. Energy efficiency gains like
these can be simulated in advance, enabling customers to participate in
determining their own
ecological footprint in various scenarios.
Such
improvements enable our customers not only to generate a competitive
advantage, but also to achieve a significant improvement in their
environmental performance.
