4.7 Article

Energy Autonomy for Robot Systems With Constrained Resources

Journal

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS
Volume 38, Issue 6, Pages 3675-3693

Publisher

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2022.3175438

Keywords

Robots; Robot kinematics; Charging stations; Multi-robot systems; Control systems; Safety; Robot sensing systems; Control barrier functions; energy sufficiency; long-term autonomy; multirobot systems

Categories

Funding

  1. National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada [2019-05165]

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This work presents an approach based on control barrier functions to enforce energy sufficiency and coordination constraints in battery-powered multirobot systems. The study also investigates the relationship between system capacity and temporal separation requirements within charging cycles.
One of the key factors for extended autonomy and resilience of battery-powered multirobot systems is their ability to maintain energy sufficiency by recharging when needed. In situations with limited access to charging facilities, robots need to be able to share and coordinate recharging activities, with guarantees that no robot will run out of energy. In this work, we present an approach based on control barrier functions (CBFs) to enforce both energy sufficiency (ensuring that no robot runs out of battery) and coordination constraints (guaranteeing mutual exclusive use of an available charging station) in a mission agnostic fashion. Moreover, we investigate the system capacity in terms of the relation between individual robot properties and the limit on temporal separation requirements within charging cycles. We show physics-based simulation results as well as real robot experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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