Energy Consumption Estimation Model for Complete Coverage of a Tetromino Inspired Reconfigurable Surface Tiling Robot

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.

Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm-Based Autonomous Path Planning for Hinged-Tetro Reconfigurable Tiling Robot

“…Research has also been conducted to provide heuristic-based algorithms [37] and distributed planning algorithms [38] for lattice-type inter-reconfigurable robots that are less architecture-specific. The hTetro robot platform, developed by Veerajagadheswar et al [39] is a chained-type inter-reconfigurable cleaning robot with seven potential configurations [40] which utilizes tileset theory to perform area coverage tasks with the awareness of energy consumption [41], [42], [43]. To carry out PP tasks on a hTetro platform, the algorithm should determine a valid path while taking several additional criteria into consideration including time consumption, path safety, and path smoothness.…”

hTetro-Infi: A Reconfigurable Floor Cleaning Robot With Infinite Morphologies

“…The authors have validated the application of three tiling theorems for tackling the area coverage by hTromo robot. The key requirements of cleaning robots are area coverage, energy usage and the time consume for cleaning [21]. Therefore, much research has been conducted to improve area coverage of tiling robots.…”

Reinforcement Learning-Based Energy-Aware Area Coverage for Reconfigurable hRombo Tiling Robot

“…The higher the probability value, the higher change the exiting of obstacles in the considered cell. Several calculations can be used to segment a situation using matrix technology, combining vitality mindfulness calculations, neural network-based system [22], across trees [23], and energy based optimization [24]. The use of lattice-based attenuation drastically reduces the multifaceted nature required until the computation is decided.…”