An application of charging management for mobile robot transportation in laboratory environments

In life science laboratories, mobile robots are adopted to do transportation tasks among distributed automated islands or rooms. To use those mobile robots effectively, a number of technology issues have to be considered, such as path planning of transportation and charging, localization, communication, etc. In this paper an application of charging management for mobile robot transportation is presented. In this application: (a) to localize the mobile robots accurately and fast in life science environments, a method using ceiling landmarks is adopted; (b) to measure the power status from all running robots, a power module for the server and client sides is designed; (c) to let mobile robots go charging automatically, an automated charging station is utilized; and (d) to select the best installing positions for the charging stations, an intelligent method based on the Artificial Immune Algorithm (AIA) is proposed, which considers both of the distances among the expected working positions and their distribution of transportation tasks. A real case shows that the presented application is effective for mobile robot charging management in life science environments.