Energy Management System for Sustainable Operation of Robot in Disaster Response

Abstract

The search and rescue (SAR) robot needs a long-endurance energy source to extend the mission. It needs the energy harvesting and management system. One of the options to harvest energy from the environment is to use photovoltaic (PV). However, the energy which is generated by the PV fluctuates. Putting a supercapacitor to the system will solve this shortcoming. Moreover, it also supports the battery to handle abrupt load variations. The proportional-integral and fuzzy logic control (PI-FLC) is adopted to determine the powersharing between the battery and the supercapacitor. The low pass filter (LPF) is added to separate a high and low frequency of the load. The supercapacitor error voltage and the high frequency are employed as the input of FLC and the output of FLC is reference power which will be taken from the supercapacitor. The PI controller will regulate the supercapacitor current approaching reference power that is given by the FLC. The simulation using Simpower toolbox MATLAB is conducted to evaluate comprehensively and it proves that the proposed method can maintain the state of charge (SoC) of supercapacitor in that the desired level i.e 38%.