Modeling the power consumption of a Wifibot and studying the role of communication cost in operation time
This work addresses energy efficiency for mobile robots like the Wifibot, but it is incremental as it applies existing modeling techniques to a specific robot and scenario.
The paper tackled the problem of limited power in mobile robots by modeling the motor power consumption of a Wifibot under various speed and acceleration levels, and investigated how communication costs affect operation time, finding that forwarding data through closer nodes can extend operation times.
Mobile robots are becoming part of our every day living at home, work or entertainment. Due to their limited power capabilities, the development of new energy consumption models can lead to energy conservation and energy efficient designs. In this paper, we carry out a number of experiments and we focus on the motors power consumption of a specific robot called Wifibot. Based on the experimentation results, we build models for different speed and acceleration levels. We compare the motors power consumption to other robot running modes. We, also, create a simple robot network scenario and we investigate whether forwarding data through a closer node could lead to longer operation times. We assess the effect energy capacity, traveling distance and data rate on the operation time.