SoC Estimation Techniques for Efficient Agricultural Robots

Abstract

Agricultural Robots are key and promising solutions for safe and sustainable food production. They can improve the quality of life of farmworkers, help reduce water and air pollution associated with traditional agricultural practices, enable bio and chemical-free crops. Finally, their deployment could bring us a better world. Agricultural Robots are essentially mobile platforms able to accomplish specific tasks in a field and work with an embedded electricity source with limited capacity. The accurate estimation of the available energy or the State of Charge (SoC) and the efficient management are primordial for their deployment. This paper provides a short review of SoC estimation methods implemented in mobile robots and highlights current challenges and limitations in this area. We also provide a study of model-based SoC estimation techniques and preliminary results of parameters and SoC estimation. We use a dataset of a Li-ion battery from Panasonic.