A Case Study on Self-Sufficiency of Individual Robotic Modules in an Arena With Limited Energy Resources

摘要

From self-sufficiency perspective, in an artificial robotic swarm, the critical parameter that influences the collective and individual's behavior is not the time required to locate and successfully dock to a recharge station in the arena, rather it is the time a robot occupies a recharge station to fully recharge its on-board batteries. It becomes critical because during recharging of a robot, the recharge station is no longer available for the rest of the modules in the arena. In a bigger swarm, it becomes impractical due to several reasons to deploy an equivalent number of recharge stations in the arena. Therefore, it is of great interest for the system designers to know the appropriate ratio between the number of recharge stations and the number of robotic modules. To test the behavior of an autonomous robotic swarm we have employed traditional bio-inspired techniques with a simple threshold based mechanism that uses the on-board state of charge of a robot to govern and adapt a robot's behavior in different scenarios. The paper concludes with the validation of initial work in Player/Stage simulator and a future work plan.