The Robotics Eco-Label Toolkit rates a robot on a 0–100 scale called the Eco-Score for Robots. It combines five sustainability metrics across seven technology categories. The project is led by Bram Vanderborght at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. The toolkit is lightweight and web-based, and it gives roboticists a way to quantify the environmental footprint of their machines.
The effort addresses a gap. A robot has an environmental impact across its full lifecycle, from rare earth mineral extraction and manufacturing to operation and end-of-life. Until now, the robotics community has lacked dedicated tools for calculating that impact.
How the Eco-Score works
The toolkit splits a robot into seven areas: materials, energy sources, sensors, processors, actuators, design, and recyclability. It evaluates each area against five metrics: resource conservation, lifecycle extension, carbon footprint, energy efficiency, and circularity. The results feed a weighted matrix, which produces the final score.
The weights are not fixed. Setting them is one of the targets of further research and collaboration. The project also offers an interactive self-assessment tool that returns an indicative score for a given robot.
A low score points to specific weaknesses. These include energy-hungry actuators, limited repairability, hard-to-recycle materials, or no plan for end-of-life. A higher score suggests sustainability was considered across the whole system. One stated goal is to make environmental trade-offs visible early enough in development to shape design choices.
The robotics eco-label project also includes educational content and community features. Researchers and developers can use them to compare approaches and share case studies. The project describes possible commercial value for companies and a way for buyers to make better-informed decisions.
The Eco-Label is one of several projects funded by IEEE RAS Sustainability Grants and showcased at ICRA in June. The grants are part of a broader IEEE RAS effort to make sustainability a more visible part of robotics research, education, design, and deployment.
Buying the right-sized robot
A second grant-funded project looks at purchasing. A team led by Antun Skuric has built an open-source platform for assessing the sustainability of collaborative robots. Its target is overspecification, meaning buying a robot larger or more capable than the job requires.
A user defines the required workspace, payload, and trajectory. The platform then identifies the minimum-mass robot that satisfies those requirements. Matching a robot to its workload can reduce unused capacity, avoid unnecessary material use, and cut wasted energy over the robot's life.
The application includes interactive tools. Users can visualize and jog the robot, inspect task-related variables and requirements, view the reachable space, and observe important robot configurations. Performance is calculated against the specific task conditions.
Solar tracking in Nigeria and a beach robot in Cyprus
Two other grant projects show robots working directly on sustainability goals. SolarPeer 360 is led by Umar Adetola Abdulganiyy, a student at the Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria. More than 90 million people in Nigeria lack reliable electricity access. The project combines robotic solar tracking, AI-assisted optimization, and peer-to-peer energy distribution. It targets two linked problems: inefficient small solar installations, and the lack of transparent, affordable ways to share surplus renewable energy among households and small businesses.
The team reported a 60.3 percent gain in average power in one tracked-versus-fixed comparison. Measured average power rose from 3.83 W to 6.14 W. AI-guided advisory and optimization contributed to a reduction in energy wastage of about 25 percent in the testing environment. The team also deployed five community mini-systems and ran a solar training workshop that reached more than 500 students.
The Caretta project, led by Mustafa Kemal Ambar, took a different route. It brought robotics and sustainability education to students aged 8 to 16 on the island of Cyprus. Named for the Caretta sea turtle, it produced a functional robot prototype designed to reduce coastal pollution. Two coastal clean-up events were held, and more than 30 students took part through seminars and hands-on learning.
What this means for the field
The robotics eco-label addresses a real omission. Robotics is often presented as a tool for sustainability, yet the machines themselves have rarely been scored on their own footprint. A single 0–100 figure, built from named categories and metrics, gives teams a common way to discuss trade-offs. The project's emphasis on early-stage design is the sound part of the approach, because material and actuator choices are hard to reverse once a product ships.
Several things remain unproven. The weights in the matrix are not settled, and they decide how a weak actuator score trades off against a strong recyclability score. Until they are fixed, two teams could reach different scores for similar machines, and the number is best read as an indicative guide rather than a comparison between products. The project also reports no validation against measured lifecycle data, and it states no adoption by manufacturers. The claim that the label could give companies a competitive advantage is a possibility the project raises, not a result.
The collaborative-robot platform is narrower but easier to test. Its criterion, the minimum-mass robot that meets a defined workspace, payload, and trajectory, is concrete and checkable. It treats mass as a stand-in for material use, which fits the project's stated aim of avoiding unnecessary material. It does not by itself capture energy use or end-of-life, so it complements a broader scoring tool rather than replacing one.
The application projects carry limited evidence so far. The SolarPeer figures come from one tracked-versus-fixed comparison and a testing environment, and the 3.83 W to 6.14 W values are small-scale. They do not show how the gains hold across seasons, sites, or larger installations. Caretta reports participation numbers and two clean-up events, but no figures for the amount of debris removed. Its value as presented is educational.
Taken together, the projects cover measurement, procurement, deployment, and education. That breadth suggests the grant program is treating sustainability as a design discipline and not only as an application area. The next test is whether the Eco-Label weights get fixed through the collaboration the project describes, and whether developers use the score to change designs before they build.