Abstract
As autonomous tiling devices begin to perform floor cleaning, agriculture harvesting, surface painting tasks, with minimal or no human intervention, a new challenge arises: these devices also need to be energy efficient and be constantly aware of the energy expenditure during deployments. Typical approaches to this end are often limited to fixed morphology robots with little or no consideration for reconfiguring class of robots. The main contribution of the paper is an energy estimation scheme that allows estimating the energy consumption when a tetromino inspired reconfigurable floor tiling robot, hTetro moves from one configuration to another for completing the area covering task. To this end, the proposed model applying the Newton-Raphson algorithm in combination with Pulse width modulation (PWM)-H bridge to characterize the energy cost associated with locomotion gaits across all valid morphologies and identify optimal area coverage strategy among available options is presented. We validate our proposed approach using an 8’ × 8’ square testbed where there exist 12 possible solutions for complete area coverage however with varying levels of energy cost. Then, we implemented our approach to our hTetro platform and conducted experiments in a real-life environment. Experimental results demonstrate the application of our model in identifying the optimal area coverage strategy that has the least associated energy cost.
Highlights
In recent years, technological giants, multinational companies and researchers showed great interest in easing the works of cleaning and actively developed various customized robots to fulfill this desire
The microcontroller is placed in the second block of the robot where it is programmed to carry out three major functions: (1) To drive the dc motors based on current morphology and control its speed during locomotion using the generated control signals, (2) To control the servo motors in full duplex mode by sending the control signals by angular rotation and receiving the feedback angle from the servo motor, (3) Establishing Human-robot interaction by receiving the user commands through
MATLAB Simulink is used for this energy modeling, where every embedded element contributing to energy consumption is modeled individually and summed up for total energy cost function [1]
Summary
Technological giants, multinational companies and researchers showed great interest in easing the works of cleaning and actively developed various customized robots to fulfill this desire. Coverage path planning with effective power usage can be established in many ways [19] like integrating the area into distinct cells, plotting graphs for optimal waypoints [3], and even by developing a neural network scheme for the repetitive cycle to cover the cleaning area in an organized way All these arrangements are best suitable for fixed morphology robots where their dynamics will be static and holds the same energy utilization for distinct movement throughout their task execution [20]. The microcontroller is placed in the second block of the robot where it is programmed to carry out three major functions: (1) To drive the dc motors based on current morphology and control its speed during locomotion using the generated control signals, (2) To control the servo motors in full duplex mode by sending the control signals by angular rotation and receiving the feedback angle from the servo motor, (3) Establishing Human-robot interaction by receiving the user commands through. A relay switch is used to switch DC motor operations during the robots reconfiguration
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