Energy Autonomy for Robot Systems With Constrained Resources

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.

I. Introduction

The field of multirobot systems has seen extensive growth in the past years, as different applications have been explored, such as surveillance [1], [2], search, and rescue [3], handling hazardous waste [4], coverage in mobile sensor networks [5], exploration, and mapping [6] just to name a few. Although these applications highlight several merits of multirobot systems, there is still a need to understand how to carry out such missions for an extended period of time in a robust and reliable manner.