A fuzzy approach to the autonomous recharging problem for mobile robots

Abstract

Autonomous Mobile Robots should be independent from human assistance. One of the open issues is the ability to manage the energy level to maximize its use and avoid human interaction to rescue a robot without energy. Several works on the literature focus on how to recharge an autonomous mobile robot, proposing hardware modification and complex energy stations. In this paper we propose a new method to decide when to recharge a robot through a fuzzy approach with three fuzzy sets: the current energy level, the distance from the target and the distance from the energy station. Usually, autonomous mobile robots decide to recharge their battery based on a fixed threshold value. This approach is too simple and can result in wasted energy in several cases. Experiments show that our approach have better results than the fixed threshold, wasting less energy on aborted tasks.