Optimal path selection for mobile robots based on energy consumption assessment of different terrain surface

Abstract

Different from the mobile robots finding the shortest path mostly based on the distance in the past, an optimal path selection problem based on energy consumption assessment of different terrain surfaces is proposed in this paper, which is transformed into finding the shortest path problem in an undirected weighted graph on the basis of constructing a wireless sensor network. An undirected weighted graph is constructed in this paper, in which nodes are made up of sensor nodes and the weight value of each edge is the ratio of the energy consumed by the robot moving between the two nodes. The landmark embedding mechanism is introduced to the graph, and energy-minimal path selection algorithm (EMPSA) is designed, which can realize the optimal path selection based on the energy consumption assessment in the case of meeting robot system real-time. The experiment is carried out from two aspects, one is the system running time and the other is the error rate of the energy consumption assessment. The experimental data show that with increase of the number of reference nodes, the running time shows the trend of decreasing at first and then increasing, and the error rate of the energy consumption assessment is gradually reduced. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the appropriate number of reference nodes, which is the key to guarantee the balance between running time and error rate. Taking the randomly generated 60 pairs of starting point and destination point as the test samples, the assessment results calculated by EMPSA is compared with the measured data generated by the robot, and the overall accuracy of the optimal path selection can reach as high as 91%, which shows that the optimal path selection method for mobile robots based on energy consumption assessment proposed in this paper is feasible and effective.