Abstract—It is difficult for robots working in a large outdoor area to receive energy from a stable commercial power source. In this case, renewable energy sources could be used to supply energy to the robot. In this paper, we present a multi-robot autonomy system that obtains energy from distributed small-scale renewable energy sources with limited storage capacity. A model based on an energy production–consumption equilibrium equation was developed to judge whether the robot could survive with the energy obtained from the allocated energy sources, and a heuristic method was proposed to improve robot utility by allocating energy nodes to each robot based on a k-means algorithm and reallocating energy sources in the border region. Finally, a small-scale renewable energy source that transfers energy by means of Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) was constructed, and a charge experiment was conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed robot energy autonomy system.

Index Terms—Multi-robot autonomy, Small-scale renewable energy, Production–consumption model, Wireless power transfer, k-means algorithm

Cite: Jaehyun Kim and Chanwoo Moon, "Multi-Robot System Maintained with Distributed Renewable Energy Sources," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 11, No. 6, pp. 389-398, June 2022. DOI: 10.18178/ijmerr.11.6.389-398 

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