Differential Drive Mobile Robot Energy Model Integration into ROS–Based Simulation Environment

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile robots are used in different applications however they are constrained by the limitation of their batteries making reducing energy consumption a significant challenge for mobile robots’ community. Thus, energy consumption modelling is therefore becoming an important approach to reducing energy cost. However, power reduction techniques evaluation and approbation may require much hardware configuration and can be time consuming especially in case of huge scenarios. We present in this paper a methodology used to enrich the Robot Operating System (ROS) infrastructure with modelling, monitoring, and energy management tools by integrating an energy consumption model of a differential drive mobile robot into ROS and Gazebo-based simulator. The simulation results illustrate the instantaneous power consumption of the robot for three different scenarios. Thereafter, the total energy consumption can be monitored without any hardware requirement at the end of each scenario