Intelligent power management: Promoting power-consciousness in teams of mobile robots

Effective robotic autonomy requires an accurate estimation of the remaining power that the robot is carrying. There are a number of methods to estimate the remaining capacity of the robot´s batteries. The accuracy of these approaches varies depending upon the chemical composition of the batteries as well as the means by which the monitoring is conducted. In this paper, an overview of various battery capacity estimation methodologies will be presented as well as a discussion of a specific implementation utilized on robotic platforms developed at the Center for Distributed Robotics at the University of Minnesota. This approach involves the novel use of fuel-gauging electronics for mobile robotic platforms. Experiments were conducted to show the accuracy of this method for both charge and discharge of the polymer Lithium-ion batteries in use.