Abstract
Swarm robotics enables large groups of robots to collaborate on complex tasks. An important barrier that prevents real-world applicability is that robots are generally battery-powered, resulting in an autonomy of a few hours at best. Existing solutions to this problem, such as autonomous charging stations, powered surfaces, and wireless power transfer, rely on the presence of a power grid. This makes them unsuitable and impractical in many situations, where robots are deployed in an ad-hoc manner, or in hard-to-reach locations. In AmbientSwarms, we propose an alternative solutions, where robots are powered using ambient energy harvesting to achieve multi-year autonomy. The major downside of ambient energy, is its variability and unpredictability. As a result, ambiently-powered robots will inevitable suffer from power failures, and intermittently turn on and off. This significantly complicates computing and communication among collaborative robots. In the AmbientSwarms project, we will develop novel methods for intermittently powered swarm robots to communicate with each other and collaboratively perform tasks. Moreover, we will study how mobile recharging stations can be used to improve the task completion success rate of the swarm. To evaluate our solution, both a simulation tool and testbed with hardware prototypes will be developed.
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