ORangE: Operational Range Estimation for Mobile Robot Exploration on a Single Discharge Cycle

TL;DR

This paper introduces ORangE, a method for estimating a mobile robot's operational range on a single battery cycle, ensuring safe exploration without recharging in unknown environments.

Contribution

It presents two novel range estimators that model energy consumption and predict operational range, validated on physical robots in diverse environments.

Findings

Range estimators accurately predict battery life.

Models validated on indoor and outdoor robots.

Performance metrics serve as benchmarks.

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for estimating the operational range for mobile robot exploration on a single battery discharge. Deploying robots in the wild usually requires uninterrupted energy sources to maintain the robot's mobility throughout the entire mission. However, for most endeavors into the unknown environments, recharging is usually not an option, due to the lack of pre-installed recharging stations or other mission constraints. In these cases, the ability to model the on-board energy consumption and estimate the operational range is crucial to prevent running out of battery in the wild. To this end, this work describes our recent findings that quantitatively break down the robot's on-board energy consumption and predict the operational range to guarantee safe mission completion on a single battery discharge cycle. Two range estimators with different levels of generality and model fidelity are presented, whose performances were validated on physical robot platforms in both indoor and outdoor environments. Model performance metrics are also presented as benchmarks.