Staying-alive and energy-efficient path planning for mobile robots

As most mobile robots are powered by batteries, their energy and operation times are limited. Therefore, how to minimize energy consumption and keep mobile robots to stay alive becomes an important problem. In this paper, by applying a dynamic energy-evaluation scheme, in which we consider if a robot has enough energy to go to next location, finish the task and return to the docking station in the path planning, we propose two staying-alive and energy-efficient path planning approaches based on the greedy TSP and Tabu-search methods, respectively. The experimental results show that our Tabu-search-based approach is the best and can provide an effective path planning by which a robot can be guaranteed to stay alive and finish all tasks with the minimum energy.