Energy Efficiency in Robotics Software: A Systematic Literature Review (2020-2024)

TL;DR

This systematic review analyzes recent research on energy efficiency in robotics software, highlighting dominant application domains, primary energy consumers, evaluation methods, and identifying gaps and opportunities for future work.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, updated overview of software-level energy efficiency approaches in robotics from 2020 to 2024, including a novel automated literature screening pipeline and reporting guidelines.

Findings

Motors/actuators are the main energy consumers in 68.4% of studies.

Simulation evaluations are most common at 51.9%, with hybrid methods also frequent.

Motion optimization and learning are the leading techniques used.

Abstract

This study presents a systematic literature review of software-level approaches to energy efficiency in robotics published from 2020 through 2024, updating and extending pre-2020 evidence. An automated-but-audited pipeline combined Google Scholar seeding, backward/forward snowballing, and large-language-model (LLM) assistance for screening and data extraction, with ~10% human audits at each automated step and consensus-with-tie-breaks for full-text decisions. The final corpus comprises 79 peer-reviewed studies analyzed across application domain, metrics, evaluation type, energy models, major energy consumers, software technique families, and energy-quality trade-offs. Industrial settings dominate (31.6%) followed by exploration (25.3%). Motors/actuators are identified as the primary consumer in 68.4% of studies, with computing/controllers a distant second (13.9%). Simulation-only evaluations remain most common (51.9%), though hybrid evaluations are frequent (25.3%). Representational (physics-grounded) energy models predominate (87.3%). Motion and trajectory optimization is the leading technique family (69.6%), often paired with learning/prediction (40.5%) and computation allocation/scheduling (26.6%); power management/idle control (11.4%) and communication/data efficiency (3.8%) are comparatively underexplored. Reporting is heterogeneous: composite objectives that include energy are most common, while task-normalized and performance-per-energy metrics appear less often, limiting cross-paper comparability. The review offers a minimal reporting checklist (e.g., total energy and average power plus a task-normalized metric and clear baselines) and highlights opportunities in cross-layer designs and in quantifying non-performance trade-offs (accuracy, stability). A replication package with code, prompts, and frozen datasets accompanies the review.