Development of a Battery Support System for the Prolonged Activity of Mobile Robots

The majority of traditional power supply solutions for prolonged activity of mobile robots have involved work robots returning to a charge station for charging or exchanging batteries. These methods have problems such as the interruption of a task in process and the limitation of robot's activity range. As a new approach to solve these problems, we have developed a battery support system that includes an exclusive robot to deliver fresh batteries. The battery support system is made up of a work robot, a support robot, a battery charge station, and a server PC to manage the entire system. The work robot in the system monitors its own battery power and location continuously while implementing tasks assigned by the server PC. If its battery power falls below a certain threshold, the server PC commands the support robot to help the work robot. After the support robot approaches and docks with the work robot, the two robots exchange batteries using the attached battery exchange mechanism. In the present paper, the details of each mechanisms of the system and the performance of the battery support system integrated with the practical mechanics are described, and experimental results are presented.