Energy management for indoor hovering robots

Abstract

Abstract-Flying has an advantage when compared to ground based locomotion, as it simplifies the task of overcoming obstacles and allows for rapid coverage of an area while also providing a birds-eye-view of the environment. One of the key challenges that has prevented engineers from coming up with convincing aerial solutions for indoor exploration is the energetic cost of flying. This paper presents a way of mitigating the energy problem regarding aerial exploration within indoor environments. This is achieved by means of a model to estimate the endurance of a hover-capable flying robot and by using ceiling attachment as a means of preserving energy while maintaining a birds-eye-view. The proposed model for endurance estimation has been extensively tested using a custom-developed quadrotor and autonomous ceiling attachment system. I. CHALLENGES AND STATE OF THE ARTThe idea of using flying robots to explore indoor environments has become popular within the robotic community in recent times1 2 . Flying has an advantage when compared to ground based locomotion, as it simplifies the task of overcoming obstacles and allows for rapid coverage of an area while also providing a birds-eyeview of the environment. One of the key challenges that has prevented engineers from coming up with convincing aerial solutions for indoor exploration is the energetic cost of flying, which is orders of magnitude higher than that of terrestrial locomotion.Imagine a robot that can fly around indoors, its task is to search a building for a pre-defined target, for example an injured human. It flies into a room and uses its onboard thermal vision sensors to scan the room for the injured human. After finding no positive matches the robot flies into the next room. The robot searches three rooms in this manner and locates the injured human in the last room. The robot has a limited amount of energy. If the robot was required to search more than these three rooms, then it is likely that its limit is reached before finding its target. If the robot could attach to the ceiling while it is searching the room, instead of remaining airborne, the search could be extended from minutes to hours, which could make all the difference in such a situation.Valenti and collaborators have developed a health management system to aid online mission planning for swarms of hovering Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) [6]. They have found that it is possible to estimate the remaining flight endurance by comparing the platforms battery voltage and This paper tackles the energy problem of aerial exploration within indoor environments, first by using ceiling attachment as a means for preserving energy, while still maintaining the birds-eye-view and second by providing an estimation model to estimate the endurance of a hover-capable flying robot. The proposed model for endurance estimation has been extensively tested using a custom-developed quadrotor and ceiling attachment system (Fig. 1). The ceiling attachment feature has been successfully demonstrated by autonomously flying ...

Indoor navigation with a swarm of flying robots

“…Robots operate in one of two control states: beacons or explorers. Beacons are passively attached to ceilings maintaining an elevated view [24], forming nodes in the network. Explorers start clustered underneath a pre-defined base beacon.…”

“…When an explorer passes in-front of another beacon, the navigation controller updates a new vector d b and waypoint set W . Waypoints are specified in 3-D and can also instruct the explorer to attach to the ceiling, achieved by gradually increasing the altitude causing it to perch with its passive attachment mechanism [24].…”

“…5 bottom) developed by James Roberts at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems [4]. The robots can attach to ferromagnetic ceilings to maintain elevated sensing for prolonged periods [24]. Alternative methods using dry-adhesives or mechanical gripping are viable [28], or the robots could land on the ground.…”

Energy-Time Efficiency in Aerial Swarm Deployment

“…This is notably evident with small aerial robots, which have severely limited flight autonomy (typically 10-15 minutes [19,23]). Although energy efficient algorithms are paramount in creating truly autonomous aerial robots, prior research is sparse [23].…”

3-D relative positioning sensor for indoor flying robots

“…The width of corridors and narrow doorways creates a strong platform size limitation (standard doorway width is approximately 1.0 m) that leads to a limited payload capacity (Soundararaj et al 2009;Grzonka et al 2009) and short flight endurance (Roberts et al 2008;Valenti et al 2007). …”