A Step Toward Mobile Robots Autonomy: Energy Estimation Models

One of the crucial questions to develop Autonomous Mobile Robotic systems is the energy consumption, its monitoring and management all along the mission. Mission complexity and fault tolerance capabilities require to exploit system redundancies, in terms of algorithms and hardware recruitment. This choice has an evident impact on energy consumption. This paper proposes an identification protocol to establish the energy consumption models for each control configuration of a Pioneer 3DX. These models are destined to be used as online predictors providing an estimation of the necessary remaining energy that mission success ’nominally’ requires. At the end, the proposed energy consumption models are validated and discussed experimentally.