2023/06/26 by Hassan Fouad, Fouad, Hassan, Vivek Shankar Varadharajan +3
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Optimization and Search Problems #Real-Time Systems Scheduling #Robotic Path Planning Algorithms #Robotics (cs.RO) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2306.15115
openalex publication_date 2023/06/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Maintaining energy sufficiency of a battery-powered robot system is a essential for long-term missions. This capability should be flexible enough to deal with different types of environment and a wide range of missions, while constantly guaranteeing that the robot does not run out of energy. In this work we present a framework based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) that provides an energy sufficiency layer that can be applied on top of any path planner and provides guarantees on the robot's energy consumption during mission execution. In practice, we smooth the output of a generic path planner using double sigmoid functions and then use CBFs to ensure energy sufficiency along the smoothed path, for robots described by single integrator and unicycle kinematics. We present results using a physics-based robot simulator, as well as with real robots with a full localization and mapping stack to show the validity of our approach.