Energy-aware operation and task allocation of autonomous robots

Abstract

Energy-aware operation is one of the visionary goals in the area of autonomous systems research. This is especially the fact as small and mobile nodes become available and application scenarios emerge, which lead to much higher requirements in terms of reliability, long-term operability, adaptation, and self-organization. In this paper, we focus on energy control and battery management in mobile robot systems. We show an approximation technique to derive the remaining energy of the local system. The mechanism is based on a model of all energy-consuming parts of the robot system and the corresponding characteristic curves. The results are used for task allocation and behavior adaptation of each autonomously acting system. The proposed methodology increases the probability of completing globally assigned tasks. Therefore, the algorithm contributes to the performance and reliability of the global system. Additionally, each node in the overall system becomes able to employ its energy resources much more efficiently. We see this energy-aware concept for task allocation as a basis for further extensions used for studies on energy efficient communication in mobile sensor networks.