Abstract
While autonomous machines are considered as a new opportunity to augment safety, reliability, productivity, and efficiency, the actual environmental and economic sustainability performances of many autonomous systems remain yet to be quantified. The present research aims to fill part of this gap by evaluating the life cycle impact and cost of autonomous solutions in the agricultural industry. Comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) are carried out on a real-world case study putting in parallel a robotic electric lawn mower (autonomous solution) and conventional - gasoline- and electricity-powered - pushing mowers (human-operated counterparts). Results are interpreted in terms of global warming potential and total cost of ownership. While the autonomous system already appears to be a promising sustainable alternative, discussions and quantitative insights are also provided on the conditions that would lead to further environmental savings and economic profit for this autonomous solution.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 209-214 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Procedia CIRP |
Volume | 90 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2020 |
Event | 27th CIRP Life Cycle Engineering Conference, LCE 2020 - Grenoble, France Duration: May 13 2020 → May 15 2020 |
Keywords
- Autonomous systems
- Case study
- Comparative life cycle assessment
- Environmental sustainability performance
- Sustainable automation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering