Development of a battery support system for the prolonged activity of mobile robots

The majority of traditional power supply solutions for prolonged activity in mobile robots have involved work robots returning to a charge station to charge or exchange batteries. These methods have problems, such as interruption of the task and process and limitation of the robot's activity range. As a new approach of solving these problems, we have developed a battery support system that includes a robot dedicated to delivering 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 performing tasks assigned by the server PC. If the 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 mechanism of the system and the performance of the battery support system integrated with practical mechanics are described, and experimental results are presented. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 94(3): 60–71, 2011; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/ecj.10284