Abstract
It is often challenging to manage the battery supply when dealing with a fleet of mobile robots during long experiments. If one uses classical recharge stations, then agents are immobilized during the whole recharge process. In this study, we present a novel approach that employs a battery pack swapping station. Batteries are charged in a rotating barrel, and the robots dock only for the time of the hot-swap process. We attained an unavailability time of only 40 seconds, with a success rate of 100 % on a total of 46 trials. Experiments above 8 hours are performed in three arenas with different configurations, which proves the relevance of our approach.
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Vaussard, F., Rétornaz, P., Roelofsen, S., Bonani, M., Rey, F., Mondada, F. (2013). Towards Long-Term Collective Experiments. In: Lee, S., Cho, H., Yoon, KJ., Lee, J. (eds) Intelligent Autonomous Systems 12. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 194. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33932-5_64
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33932-5_64
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