Energy-efficient mobile robots

Mobile robots can be used in many applications, such as carpet cleaning, search and rescue, exploration, and entertainment. Robots usually carry limited energy and thus energy conservation is important. To our best knowledge, this is the first research project to study energy-efficient mobile robots in a systematic way. In this thesis, I first develop power models for two different types of robots, and then focus on five related problems: motion planning, exploration, fleet size, deployment, and sensor network maintenance. The first two problems consider single-robot systems, and the latter three focus on multi-robot systems. Corresponding to the five individual problems, my contributions are the following. (1) My research compares energy consumptions of three different routes and presents my method of energy-efficient motion planning. (2) This thesis investigates an orientation-based exploration algorithm that can reduce repeated coverage and save traveling distance and energy consumption. (3) I study the fleet size problem to determine the number of robots for pickup and delivery tasks under energy and time constraints. (4) This study develops three robot deployment strategies to minimize the deployment overhead and use fewer robots to cover an area. (5) This thesis designs three different algorithms for coordinating robots with sensor networks to automate sensor network maintenance and consider motion and communication overhead.