Mobile robot energy modelling integrated into ros and gazebo-based simulation environment

Abstract

Mobile robots' autonomy is limited by the capacity of their batteries; thus, their energy consumption estimation and management are important issues to deal with energy minimization techniques, such as path planning, tasks scheduling etc. These techniques need to be tested, evaluated, and approved for different scenarios; however, this cannot be feasible in case of huge scenarios and may require much hardware setup. In this paper, we introduce a numerical solution by enriching 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/Gazebo-based simulator. The obtained results involve realtime power consumption of the virtual robot for predefined scenarios, and the total energy consumption is monitored numerically at the end of each scenario without any hardware requirement.