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Perpetual Robot Swarm: Long-Term Autonomy of Mobile Robots Using On-the-fly Inductive Charging

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Abstract

Swarm robotics studies the intelligent collective behaviour emerging from long-term interactions of large number of simple robots. However, maintaining a large number of robots operational for long time periods requires significant battery capacity, which is an issue for small robots. Therefore, re-charging systems such as automated battery-swapping stations have been implemented. These systems require that the robots interrupt, albeit shortly, their activity, which influences the swarm behaviour. In this paper, a low-cost on-the-fly wireless charging system, composed of several charging cells, is proposed for use in swarm robotic research studies. To determine the system’s ability to support perpetual swarm operation, a probabilistic model that takes into account the swarm size, robot behaviour and charging area configuration, is outlined. Based on the model, a prototype system with 12 charging cells and a small mobile robot, Mona, was developed. A series of long-term experiments with different arenas and behavioural configurations indicated the model’s accuracy and demonstrated the system’s ability to support perpetual operation of multi-robotic system.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Innovate UK (Project No. KTP009811), UK EPSRC (Reference: EP/P01366X/1) and Czech Science Foundation project 17-27006Y.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Farshad Arvin, Simon Watson, Jose Espinosa & Barry Lennox

  2. Mechanical Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University, 06800, Ankara, Turkey

    Ali Emre Turgut

  3. Artificial Intelligence Centre, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czechia

    Tomáš Krajník

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  1. Farshad Arvin
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Correspondence to Farshad Arvin.

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Arvin, F., Watson, S., Turgut, A.E. et al. Perpetual Robot Swarm: Long-Term Autonomy of Mobile Robots Using On-the-fly Inductive Charging. J Intell Robot Syst 92, 395–412 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-017-0673-8

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