Research on online scheduling and charging strategy of robots based on shortest path algorithm

Abstract

In recent years, the employment of mobile chargerson energy supplementation of mobile charger (MC) has received increasing attention. This paper focuses on the online scheduling and charging strategies of robots in warehouses with unknown moving paths. First, the storage scenario is abstracted to a grid model in this article. Secondly, a shortest path algorithm based on coordinate difference under the premise of giving priority to the robot task is proposed. Then, the minimum service quantity of MC is determined through random simulation. Last but not least, the model of M∕M∕n∕∞∕m∕FCFS is used to calculate the average charging delay of the robot. Through simulation analysis, it can be found that the average service rate of MC is inversely proportional to the average charging delay of the robot. As time increases, the number of charging requests received by the MC also rises linearly. However, in a fixed length of time of Δt , the number of charging requests is approximately a fixed value. Moreover, there is a linear positive correlation between the number of charging requests received by the MC and the total number of robots. When the total number of robots stays unchanged, the more MCs in the warehouse, the smaller the average charging delay of the robot will be yet with lower bound. The robot online scheduling and charging strategy proposed in this paper is applicable for most storage scenarios. Further, it contributes a new idea for further research on robot mobile charging scheduling strategy.