In this paper, a task-dependent energetic analysis of robotic manipulators is presented. The proposed approach includes a novel performance index, which relates the energy consumption of a robotic manipulator to its inertia ellipsoid. To validate the method, the dynamic and electro-mechanic models of a three degrees-of-freedom (3-DOF) SCARA robot are implemented and the influence of the location of a predefined point-to-point task (such as a pick-and-place operation) within the robot workspace is considered. The task-dependent analysis provides energy consumption maps that are compared with the prediction of the theoretical formulation based on the proposed trajectory energy index (TEI), which can be used to optimally locate the task to obtain minimal energy consumption without having to compute it through extensive dynamic simulations. Results show the effectiveness of the method and the good agreement between the TEI and the effective energy consumption within the whole workspace of the robot for several trajectories.
