Near-Optimal Mobile Robot Recharging with the Rate-Maximizing Forager

摘要

We examine the practical problem of a mobile autonomous robot performing a long-duration survey task, during which it must recharge its batteries periodically. We present a scalable, online, heuristic method that allows the robot to recharge efficiently, thus maximizing its rate of work. The method is a direct application of the rate-maximizing foraging model, which seeks to explain the behaviour of animals solving related problems. Simulation results suggest that the method performs very well compared to optimal and naive heuristic approaches.