Perpetual Robot Swarm: Long-Term Autonomy of Mobile Robots Using On-the-fly Inductive Charging

Arvin, Farshad; Watson, Simon; Turgut, Ali Emre; Espinosa, J. Alberto; Krajník, Tomáš; Lennox, Barry

doi:10.1007/s10846-017-0673-8

Cited by 29 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…It currently retails at £100 per robot and is fully open-source (hardware and software). It has been successfully used for teaching on the undergraduate MRAS unit (Section 1.1) and MSc projects as well as being used for swarm research [17].…”

Section: Commercial Availabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mona: an Affordable Open-Source Mobile Robot for Education and Research

Arvin

Espinosa

Bird

et al. 2018

J Intell Robot Syst

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103

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Mobile robots are playing a significant role in Higher Education science and engineering teaching, as they offer a flexible platform to explore and teach a wide-range of topics such as mechanics, electronics and software. Unfortunately the widespread adoption is limited by their high cost and the complexity of user interfaces and programming tools. To overcome these issues, a new affordable, adaptable and easy-to-use robotic platform is proposed. Mona is a low-cost, open-source and open-hardware mobile robot, which has been developed to be compatible with a number of standard programming environments. The robot has been successfully used for both education and research at The University of Manchester, UK.

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Section: Commercial Availabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper presents the design of the Mona robot, a low-cost, open-source platform which has been developed for both teaching and research. Details of the robot's application to research have been presented in [17]. The contribution of this paper is to its application to teaching.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mona: an Affordable Open-Source Mobile Robot for Education and Research

Arvin

Espinosa

Bird

et al. 2018

J Intell Robot Syst

Self Cite

103

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Application of this technique to mobile robots is limited to situations where the robot is within close proximity to the transmitter. The use of a power floor mat allows for a large charging area for single- [9] and multi-robot scenarios [47,48]. In [9], the entire mat consists of only a single-layer transmitter coil and multiple pickups were used on the receiver to achieve more regular power output across the mat.…”

Section: Iptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [47], the coils on the transmitter mat have been designed for higher power distribution at a fixed diameter so that similar power can be transferred to multiple robots. In [48], multiple transmitter coils were arranged in a grid to achieve large coverage and dynamic charging in an arena. For underwater robots, guide, and locking mechanisms have been used to align the coils, arranged in an outer (transmitter) and inner (receiver) loop, and to hold the robot in place [49][50][51].…”

Section: Iptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limitations of wireless power transfer technologies for mobile robots

2019

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Advances in technology have seen mobile robots becoming a viable solution to many global challenges. A key limitation for tetherless operation, however, is the energy density of batteries. Whilst significant research is being undertaken into new battery technologies, wireless power transfer may be an alternative solution. The majority of the available technologies are not targeted toward the medium power requirements of mobile robots; they are either for low powers (a few Watts) or very large powers (kW). This paper reviews existing wireless power transfer technologies and their applications on mobile robots. The challenges of using these technologies on mobile robots include delivering the power required, system efficiency, human safety, transmission medium, and distance, all of which are analyzed for robots operating in a hazardous environment. The limitations of current wireless power technologies to meet the challenges for mobile robots are discussed and scenarios which current wireless power technologies can be used on mobile robots are presented.

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“…To overcome these limitations, a multi-input single output wireless power transmission (MISO-WPT) system has been proposed in [23,24] consisting of several independent single WPT systems, so that after position detection only one primary side coil is activated. The magnetic field remains focused, but each single-coil WPT system needs an individual primary side supply circuit, which makes the system bulky and costly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiplexed Supply of a MISO Wireless Power Transfer System for Battery-Free Wireless Sensors

et al. 2020

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Multi-input single output wireless power transmission (MISO-WPT) systems have decisive advantages concerning flexible receiver position in comparison to single coil systems. However, the supply of the primary side brings a large uncertainty in case of variable positions of the secondary side. In this paper, a compact multiplexed primary side electronic circuit is proposed, which includes only one signal generator, a passive peak detector, a communication module, and a compensation capacitor. The novel approach has been studied and evaluated for a MISO-WPT system having a 16 coils on primary side and one coil on secondary side having the double diameter. Results show that a standard microcontroller, in this case an STM32, is sufficient for the control of the whole system, so that the costs and the energy consumption are significantly reduced. An activation strategy has been proposed, which allows to determine the optimal transmitting coil for each position of the receiving coil and to switch it on. The time-to-start-charging at different positions of the receiving coil and different number of neighbors has been determined. It remains in all cases under 2.5 s.This reduces the size of the supply circuit relative to the previous solutions. In [19], a multi-coil system with multiplexed solution is presented with a singular supply circuit. However, the selection of the appropriate coil requires dual MOSFET switches, which presents some similarity to a switch-based multi-coil system. Nevertheless, the control of the multi-coil system switches needs microcontrollers with a high number of pins. For that, in case of a big number of transmitting coils, an FPGA [22] is proposed as processing unit, leading to an increase of both energy consumption and costs.In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of a multiplexed circuit on the primary side supply approach, with the aim to reduce the circuit size and to control the system by a simple microcontroller with a limited number of pins. The main objective is to significantly decrease both energy consumption and system costs. To this end, we propose to use receiving coils having the double diameter of the transmitting coils. This is important to cover at least a singular transmitting coil for different possible positions on the top of the pad to power the device for all the possible positions. In order to enable the detection and the powering of even battery-free wireless sensor nodes, we propose that the communication between the transmitting and receiving coil is started from the transmitting side and supplied from the transferred energy on the secondary side.The paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, the primary side supply circuit for a system is presented. The description of the proposed multi-coil system control algorithm is detailed in Section 3. The experimental evaluation of the developed algorithm are reported in Section 4. Section 5 shows the analysis of the required time to start the charging process. A conclusion is provided in Section 6. Design of the Primar...

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Perpetual Robot Swarm: Long-Term Autonomy of Mobile Robots Using On-the-fly Inductive Charging

Cited by 29 publications

References 60 publications

Mona: an Affordable Open-Source Mobile Robot for Education and Research

Mona: an Affordable Open-Source Mobile Robot for Education and Research

Limitations of wireless power transfer technologies for mobile robots

Multiplexed Supply of a MISO Wireless Power Transfer System for Battery-Free Wireless Sensors

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