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Victor Marmol School of Computer Science Senior Thesis Market-Based Coordination of Recharging Robots Advisor: M. Bernardine Dias, Ph.D. Robotics Institute Mentor: Balajee Kannan, Ph.D. Robotics Institute Slide 2 Autonomous Recharging Necessary for any group of mobile robots that are to be effective beyond a short amount of time Robots can run for weeks, months, years Mobile and static recharging units allow a group of worker robots to recharge when necessary Mobile recharger docking with a worker. Real system (left) CAD model (right) 2 Slide 3 Related Work Most existing systems dont implement recharging Most existing approaches are threshold-based and make decisions utilizing only the current state Battery voltage threshold [2, Silverman et al. 2002][8, Silverman et al. 2003][12, Munoz et al. 2002][13, Munoz et al. 2002] Time threshold [5, Austin et al. 2001] Distance threshold [4, Waverla at al. 2008][7, Waverla et al. 2007] Most current systems arent charge-aware No existing strategy for coordinating multiple worker robots and a recharging unit 3 Slide 4 Our Approach Design and develop a market-based distributed system for planning and coordination Give each robot charge-awareness Enhance system to include mobile rechargers Mobile recharging agents docking arm GUI integrating map and robot control 4 Slide 5 Market-Based Systems Uses a simulated economy to trade tasks between robots based on their costs Cost is defined by a set of cost functions Advantages: Distributed Fault tolerant Scalable 5 Task An auction for a task with two bidding robots. Arrows are bids, green arrows are winning bids. Cost metric is distance. Slide 6 Charge-Awareness Robots estimate their remaining operational time Workers bid on work tasks to insert into their schedules Recharging tasks inserted to create balanced schedules Schedules are optimized to minimize distance traveled Workers assume no mobile rechargers for initial estimate 6 Existing schedule Task Charge-aware schedule Charge-Aware Task Home Slide 7 Mobile Rechargers Goal: maximize work done by worker robots Workers auction off recharging tasks Mobile rechargers bid on recharging tasks with rendezvous points along the workers path 7 Task Schedule with mobile recharging Recharge Slide 8 Evaluation: Distance Ran all strategies on a schedule of 50 tasks 8 Strategy Distance Gains Charge-Aware Distance Gains Mobile Recharger Infinite battery-1.37 (-0.08%)-0.96 (-0.56%) Battery threshold15.89 (9.29%)16.30 (9.55%) Distance threshold15.76 (9.21%)16.17 (9.48%) Charge-aware-0.41 (0.24%) Mobile recharger-0.41 (-0.24%- Slide 9 Evaluation: Time Ran all strategies on a schedule of 50 tasks Two methods for calculating recharging time Method 1: Constant time to recharge Method 2: Proportional to amount of charge required 9 Time Gains Charge-Aware Time Gains Mobile Recharger StrategyMethod #1Method #2Method #1Method #2 Infinite battery-53.10 (-5.24%)-1841.2 (-65.73%)-37.31 (-3.74%)-1595.4 (-62.43%) Battery threshold52.00 (5.13%)133.70 (4.77%)67.79 (6.80%)379.50 (14.49%) Distance threshold102 (10.07%)9.50 (0.34%)117.79 (11.81%)255.30 (9.99%) Charge-aware--15.79 (1.59%)245.80 (9.62%) Mobile recharger-15.79 (-1.56%)-245.80 (-8.77%)-- Slide 10 Evaluation: Scalability (Distance) Ran all strategies on schedules of increasing size 10 Our strategies consistently outperform current approaches Slide 11 Conclusion & Future work Our strategies represent an advancement in the state of the art for autonomous recharging Planning and coordination in autonomous recharging greatly enhances the amount of work performed by mobile robots Future Work Extend to larger teams More workers More mobile rechargers Make mobile rechargers charge-aware 11 Slide 12 Acknowledgements M. Bernardine Dias, Ph.D. and Balajee Kannan, Ph.D. Jimmy Bourne, Sairam Yamanoor, M. Freddie Dias, and Nisarg Kothari Everyone in the rCommerce group Part of the rCommerce group 12 Slide 13 References 1. Seungjun Oh, A. Z. & K. Taylor (2000). Autonomous battery recharging for indoor mobile robots, in the proceedings of Australian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA2000). 2. Silverman, M.C ; Nies, D ; Jung, B & Sukhatme, G.S (2002). Staying alive: A docking station for autonomous robot recharging, in IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, 2002 3. Kottas, A., Drenner, A., and Papanikolopoulos, N. 2009. Intelligent power management: promoting power-consciousness in teams of mobile robots. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international Conference on Robotics and Automation (Kobe, Japan, May 12 - 17, 2009). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, 2459-2464. 4. J. Wawerla and R. T. Vaughan. Optimal robot recharging strategies for time discounted labour. In Proc. of the 11th Int. Conf. on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, 2008. 5. D. J. Austin, L. Fletcher, and A. Zelinsky,.Mobile robotics in the long term,. in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Oct. 2001. 6. Litus, Y., Vaughan, R. T., and Zebrowski, P. (2007). The frugal feeding problem: Energy-efficient, multi-robot, multi-place rendezvous. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. 7. Wawerla, J. and Vaughan, R. T. (2007). Near-optimal mobile robot recharging with the rate-maximizing forager. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Life. 8. M. Silverman, B. Jung, D. Nies, G. Sukhatme. Staying Alive Longer: Autonomous Robot Recharging Put to the Test. Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES) Technical Report CRES-03-015. University of Southern California, 2003. 9. Alex Couture-Beil and Richard T. Vaughan. Adaptive mobile charging stations for multi-robot systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'09). 10. St. Loius, MO, October 2009.Zebrowski, P ; Vaughan, R (2005). Recharging Robot Teams: A Tanker Approach, International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR'05), Seattle, Washington, July 18th-20th, 2005. 13 Slide 14 References 11. Yaroslav Litus, Pawel Zebrowski, and Richard T. Vaughan. A distributed heuristic for energy-efficient multi-robot multi-place rendezvous. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 25(1):130-135, 2009. 12. Munoz A., Sempe F., and Drogoul A. (2002). Sharing a Charging Station in Collective Robotics. 13. Semp F., Muoz A., Drogoul A. Autonomous Robots Sharing a Charging Station with no Communication: a Case Study. Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS'02). June 2002. 14. M. B. Dias, Traderbots: A new paradigm for robust and efficient multirobot coordination in dynamic environments, Ph.D. dissertation, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, January 2004. 15. TraderBots Users Guide. Carnegie Mellon University, National Robotics Engineering Center. August 1, 2008. 16. Flinn, J., Satyanarayanan, M. Energy-aware Adaptation for Mobile Applications. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems and Principles. Kiawah Island, SC, December, 1999. 17. McFarland, D. & Spier, E. (1997). Basic cycles, utility and opportunism in self-sufficient robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 20, 179-90. 18. Birk A. (1997) Autonomous Recharging of Mobile Robots. In: Proceedings of the 30th International Sysposium on Automative Technology and Automation. Isata Press 19. Ngo, T. D., Raposo, H., Schioler, H., Being Sociable: Multirobots with Self-sustained Energy, Proceedings of the 15th IEEE Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, Athens, Greece, 27-29 July, 2007 14 Slide 15 Questions? Pioneer P3DX and LAGR robots 15