Collaborative Charging Scheduling For Multi-robot Systems

With the rapid increase of storage space and labor costs,the space of storage workshops and limited charging station resources are facing severe constraints.Therefore,designing an efficient charging station allocation algorithm is essential for improving the utilization of storage space and the charging efficiency of robots.The use of multi-robots is becoming more and more extensive,and the number of robots used in workshops is also increasing.As electric products,robots are bound to face the problem of charging or replacing electricity.This thesis focuses on the problem of multi-robots charging scheduling,analyzing the inefficient operation of multi-robots charging scheduling and causing a large number of charging stations to occupy space resources,establishing a mathematical model of the charging scheduling problem and designing a reasonable charging scheduling allocation method.This is the basis for the large-scale application of multi-robot systems to automated workshops.It also increases the space utilization rate of the workshop and reduces the installation and maintenance costs of charging stations.First,starting from the actual problem of industrial robot charging,the task of multi-robot charging requirements and charging process are studied and analyzed,and the problem is accurately mathematically modeled,and an objective function based on the minimum charging time is designed.A centralized solution method is used to solve the proposed mathematical model,and then a distributed solution scheme is designed according to the centralized solution scheme.Eliminate the robot’s dependence on the central server.After considering the charging scheduling problem of idle robots,in this case,the charging demand of idle robots is not so urgent compared to robots with tasks.This thesis starts from the perspective of charging station resource optimization and uses a’evenly split’ idea.This article designs two simple and easy methods to allocate idle robots near different charging stations,which is beneficial to share the charging pressure of charging stations.To realize the balanced utilization of charging station resources.Finally,this thesis proposes to achieve the power balance problem of idle robots near the charging station in a given total time.First,the general constrained optimization problem of the model is established,and the objective function is transformed into an unconstrained solution through the combination of the Lagrangian function and the penalty term.Each robot uses the strong connectivity of the network to iteratively solve its own objective function,and realizes the collaborative calculation of their respective charging time between the robots.After charging in a given time,the power of each robot reaches a relatively balanced state.The experiment verifies the feasibility of the proposed method and also guarantees the high availability of the multi-robot system,which effectively improves the work efficiency of the robot.