To be fully autonomous, a robot should either have an indefinite power supply or should be able to renew it's energy by some means In the case of indoor mobile robots this usually means recharging the batteries. This paper describes the recharging station and docking algorithms that we have developed and presents the results achieved. The docking station is a simple design, requiring only minor hardware modifications on the robot side, and the total cost is under USD100. The docking algorithm uses a particle filter to extract the recharging station location from the laser range sensor data. The system was implemented on the XR4000 robot platform and, demonstrates that a simple approach can achieve high rates of success.
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