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Charging Station Placement for Indoor Robotic Applications
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Mr. Tanmoy Kundu*
Email: tanmoy1040@gmail.com
Autonomous indoor robots are quickly evolving to address a broader range of automation needs in factories and households. In factories, manufacturing and material handling are widely handled by indoor robots. For example, in Amazon Warehouse, robots are used to pick an object from some place and drop it to another place. Robots are also used for manifold domestic purposes. Take an example of the robot Roomba from iRobot Create, which can autonomously clean a room using vacuum cleaning technology. A recent trend suggests that robots will find applications in commercial spaces such as hotels, hospitals, offices, banks and malls.
Indoor robots are generally battery- powered, and their battery needs to be recharged at regular intervals. A robot that
requires human intervention to constantly monitor its charge level and carry it to the charger is complicated and lacks autonomy, which is fundamental to robotics. Here, we take a moment to define ‘power threshold’ of the robot. It is the critical level of charge when the robot should necessarily move towards a charging station. Hence, whenever its battery reaches its power threshold, the robot should abort its current task and move towards a charging station with the remaining amount of charge. Also, different types of robots have different motion dynamics. Thus, aggregating all these, given the power threshold and charging station locations, the robot should be able to move autonomously towards a charging station from any location in the workspace with the remaining charge with it.
* Mr. Tanmoy Kundu, PhD Scholar from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, is pursuing his research on “Energy- Aware Path and Task Planning for Mobile Robots using Formal Methods”. His popular science story entitled “Charging Station Placement for Indoor Robotic Applications” has been selected for AWSAR Award.