Abhimanyu Chakraborty
ISWA Technical Communications Coordinator
The Earth doesn’t have limitless resources — and no industry, including robotics, is exempt from that reality.
This was one of the overarching messages behind the first workshop on day 2 of the European Robotics Forum (ERF) in Stavanger, Norway. The EU-funded iBot4CRMs project, for which ISWA is a communications and dissemination partner, was present at the forum with a dedicated booth.
As the first speaker, Adrien Escande from Centre Inria de l’Université Grenoble Alpes used the “Planetary boundaries” framework, proposed by Johan Rockström and his colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2009, to challenge the notion of “endless growth” on a planet with finite resources.
“7 of the 9 planetary boundaries that define safe operating space for humanity have been transgressed and, sometimes, in a significant way. The consequences of these are well documented,” said Adrien.
Here, Adrien referred to the main idea behind the planetary boundaries’ framework: the Earth has limits. Rockstrom’s team identified nine biophysical systems, represented in a circle, that support the Earth’s stability and resilience. Currently, 7 of the 9 boundaries that regulate the stability of the planet have been breached.
The speaker also used the Doughnut Economics framework, developed by economist Kate Raworth, to illustrate whether it’s possible to think of robotics that can help humanity to be inside the doughnut, which balances human needs within planetary boundaries.
Raworth’s framework builds on Rockstrom’s planetary boundaries research by adding a social foundation, including 12 dimensions, such as food, water, gender equality, education, housing, etc., key to humanity’s wellbeing. In short, the outer ring is the Earth’s biophysical limits (as proposed by Rockstrom), which shouldn’t be overshot, and the inner ring represents the social foundation which humanity shouldn’t fall short of. The space between comprises the safe operating space for humanity to thrive, which is essentially Raworth’s contribution.
Against this backdrop, the workshop turned to what these constraints mean in practice for the robotics industry — and for Europe in particular.
From a resource availability standpoint, a significant portion of strategic and critical raw materials required for the robotics industry are outside of Europe, raising supply risk challenges. These materials underpin European digital and green transformation and are at the heart of the Clean Industrial and Green Deal. Thus, it brings to the fore a Eurocentric and geopolitical dilemma: If most of the materials needed for robots are not found in Europe, and in the face of a global race for resources, producer countries increasingly retain these resources for their own use, what does Europe do in this situation?
It is within this context of constrained resources and geopolitical uncertainty that Adrien posed a fundamental question.
“Is it even feasible?” asked Adrien, adding that there’s no clear-cut answer because robots are machines with a life cycle and every part of it will have direct negative impacts on the environment, right from raw material extraction and manufacturing to robotic usage and end-of-life.
To illustrate the scale of the challenge, he pointed to a specific material as a case in point: Copper.
Copper, as a strategic raw material, has very high demand but supply constraints, including, but not limited to, ore grade decline. It is also essential to the robotics industry, among many others.
Adrien stated that the highest-grade copper deposits are being exhausted, new discoveries are declining, and the lead time from identifying a mine to full production is around 17 years. There is a growing gap between copper demand and supply.
“Now, if you consider the ambition of deploying 10 billion humanoid robots, the gap becomes stark,” he said. Achieving that at scale would require 4 years of the current global copper production — and copper is not the only mineral involved in making robots.
As constraints become more evident, we are more likely to confront the question: Can we continue to build robots?
“If you say yes, then there needs to be a justification: Is the robot actually useful? On this, we have almost no data that looks into the environmental footprint of robotics. And then we also lack the tools to evaluate the environmental impact of a robot and the societal value of it,” he added.
Potentially, one pathway among many others, according to Adrien, could be to think of different design approaches and work with other types of materials, and to conduct more background research and development in this field.
The resource scarcity question logically leads us to ask if we should rethink the very models we use to manage resources in the first place.
Luis Frölén Ribeiro’s (Polytechnic Institute of Bragança) presentation on “The Spiral Economy: Physical Constraints for Sustainable Industry” was the perfect segue to explore the spiral economy, which, according to him, is “a more honest description of real systems”.
“There are no closed loops in engineering,” informed Ribiero.
He gives an example of an electric motor to support his argument. “In its conceptual form, an electric motor converts all electrical energy into motion. In reality, energy is lost, and materials wear out… at the heart of this is entropy — a physical property as fundamental as gravity. Just as we cannot engineer our way around gravity, we cannot engineer our way around entropy. It constrains every transformation, in every system, at every scale,” added Ribiero.
This has consequences for the way we think about sustainability models and whether they reflect the physical reality of the systems they describe.
Ribiero points to the Circular Economy as an example, which, according to his presentation, is a regenerative model designed for the closure of material loops. But he cautioned, “The circular economy does not assume perfect closure. The problem appears when it is used as if it did.”
This is where, Ribiero said, the spiral economy offers “a more honest description of real systems”.
“Rather than designing for closure, it describes what actually happens: keeping materials and systems in use for as long as possible and transformation, as systems change over time. Losses cannot be avoided. Energy is always needed.”
He proposed an engineer’s spiral economy creed with three aspects: design for evolution, build for durability, and design for maintenance and upgrade.
A practical example, Ribiero stated, is the industrial electric motor: rather than replacing the entire unit, it is possible to rewind the stator, replace bearings, and upgrade the rotor or insulation class — extending the life of the system without rebuilding its structure. This is the spiral economy in action, and it is directly applicable to robotics design.
In the end, he concluded that sustainability isn’t the problem; the framing is.
“The language we use to describe these systems shapes how we design them. When that language ignores physical limits, the models that follow will too.”
