Being sociable: Multirobots with self-sustained energy

To date, mobile robots are emerging to target for applications in our life. Most of research focus on autonomous behaviors of mobile robots, instead of considering the determination to make a robot being truly autonomous. To be interested in animal species, e.g ant or bee, an individual has to coordinate with others to keep the society alive. Likewise, as an initial condition, a robot system is truly autonomous if such a system has energy autonomy. Further, to be sociable robots, the robots must have not only behavioural autonomy but energetic autonomy. Thereby, inspired from the nature of animals, this paper aims to present a system of multiple robots with self-sustained energy to achieve energy autonomy. We examine a multirobot system with energy sharing capability based on battery distribution to approach to the scope of sociable robots. First we show simulation results of the potential energy to suggest a scheme for creating sociable robots. Later we perform early real implementation of our robots in the CAD model, hardware, and the control architecture. Finally we describe the initial experimental deployment of the system.