Ansis Avotins

AREUS — Innovative hardware and software for sustainable industrial robotics

Industrial Robotics (IR) may be envisaged as the key technology to keep the manufacturing industry at the leading edge. Unfortunately, at the current state-of-the-art, IR is intrinsically energy intensive, thus compromising factories sustainability in terms of ecological footprint and economic costs. Within this scenario, this paper presents a new framework called AREUS, focusing on eco-design, eco-programming and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of robotized factories. The objective is to overcome current IR energetic limitations by providing a set of integrated technologies and engineering platforms. In particular, novel energy-saving hardware is firstly introduced, which aim at exchanging/storing/recovering energy at factory level. In parallel, innovative engineering methods and software tools for energy-focused simulation are developed, as well as energy-optimal scheduling of multi-robot stations. At last, LCA methods are briefly described, which are capable to assess both environmental and economic costs, linked to the flows of Material, Energy and Waste (MEW). A selected list of industrially-driven demonstration case studies is finally presented, along with future directions of improvement.

A Different Approach to Electrical Energy Consumption Monitoring

A different approach to electrical energy/power calculation by means of summing of non-even time current samples over short time periods are described in to the article.

Towards smart street LED lighting systems and preliminary energy saving results

The article gives an overview of various researches dealing with smart or intelligent street lighting systems, and what is meant with this term in different countries. Several available architectures of smart street lighting systems as well as those for future are described and discussed. Further some researches and developments of such systems in Riga Technical University are explained with the examples, also showing preliminary practical energy saving results of tests in real conditions of Riga city infrastructure. This is the first part of articles series about this research.

Practically oriented e-learning workshop for knowledge improvement in engineering education computer control of electrical technology

Creation of good knowledge is based on practical exercise combined with theory learning. Studies in electrical engineering require many different laboratory exercises, traditionally carried out within the premises of university, where students can practice only several hours per week or even less. Such limited possibilities stipulate longer course durations and reduce knowledge creation quality. Possibility to gain some practical skills before carrying out laboratory assignments in real laboratory can become an essential part of the studies., facilitating much deeper understanding of the subject. For this reason a web-based e-Learning distance workshop in electrical engineering is elaborated and discussed in this paper. It is planned to cover courses in electrical drives, power electronics, LED lightning and automatic control.

Development of Energy Monitoring System for SmartGrid Consumer Application

The number of electricity consuming equipment for existing household end-user is continuing to increase, and some residential buildings already consume more energy than existing building regulations prescribe. The uprising SmartGrid technology with alternative energy sources could be a key to solve this problem, but it is demanding also for a “smarter” consumer with ability to monitor and manage his loads. Such a monitoring system can also improve energy efficiency, as it can change consumer non-saving habits, by teaching him possibilities where the energy can be saved. Therefore the paper is devoted to development of new concept of household energy consumption monitoring system. Due to new approach of energy monitoring, the costs of needed metering equipment and total metering system are lowered. The proposed method provides energy consumption apportionment between consumers instead of precise energy consumption metering for each consumer type.

Power Measurement and Data Logger with High-Resolution for Industrial DC-Grid Application

Abstract Power and energy measurement and monitoring is a key factor for many industries in terms of energy and cost efficiency evaluation. Due to trends of Smart Grid concept application in industrial environment, including decentralized DC-Grid implementation, for precise evaluation – faster and low-cost measurement equipment is needed. Manufacturing industry widely uses industrial robots that have dynamic load characteristics for which faster measurement equipment is needed. This paper gives a brief description of the developed power measurement equipment, its structure and interconnection with industrial Profinet network. Further as a testing method steady state and dynamic loads are selected and analyzed. For testing, specially created industrial DC-Grid testing environment and equipment was used. Testing results show that the selected method and idea is working and is able to measure dynamic loads with high resolution. For other industrial load types there is a discussion going on about the issue of how detailed the resolution is needed in industrial SmartGrids, as energy forecast is a new trend in robotic industry and manufacturing planning.

Context application to improve LED lighting control systems

Paper deals with existing and future LED lighting control system architectures for Smart Grids and introduces to context aware intelligent LED lighting control system. Scope of this paper is limited to context awareness integration into management components, using networked control systems to identify particular context awareness applications in order to improve utilization efficiency, and minimise energy consumption. To prove the concept an analysis with empirical case study for street lighting and public building context aware lighting scenarios is presented.