Battery Charge Dispatching in Multi-robot Systems

Abstract

Multi-robot systems (MRSs) attract more and more attention due to their efficiency and safety. In a practical scenario, robots need to work for a long time without human intervention, which requires the robots do not run out of power. The battery charging strategy of most systems uses a fixed threshold or fixed periods to determine when robots should be charged. It does not consider the system task situation, nor the situation of charging station (CS) competition. This paper proposes an efficient charge dispatching strategy, which can ensure that a robot firstly completes a task quickly when it is scheduled to work and firstly be charged to be ready for a subsequent task when it is idle. For the case that multiple robots compete for the same CS, we designe a bidding strategy to determine which robot should be serviced. A rule-based charging strategy is used to compare with the proposed charge dispatching strategy in this paper. The results show that our method performs better in terms of stability and efficiency.