Tanker based robot recharging

Teams of autonomous mobile robots wishing to sustain long term operation need a means of refueling. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by requiring that each robot return to a central charging station. Since energy is a scarce resource, this must be done in an energy efficient way. This thesis proposes an energy efficient tanker based approach for recharging robot teams. A service robot is employed to transport energy from a charging station to other robots. Energy efficient path planning for this robot is shown to be NP-hard. Several novel heuristic techniques for joint robot motion planning to achieve efficient tanker-robot meetings are presented and analyzed. A heuristic is developed which is perfectly scalable, and shown both analytically and experimentally to produce energy efficient robot paths.