Energy modeling of differential drive robots

Improving the energy efficiency of robots and increasing the time of operation has been a very hot research topic in recent times. There has been a lot of work on optimizing energy consumption, especially in mobile robots. Researchers have been focused on designing motion planning techniques along with velocity control to reduce the energy expenditure. But there has been a lack of a well-defined and a complete energy model that can act as a cost function for all the optimization algorithms. Having such a model not only provides a platform for energy loss control but can also give an idea about the nature of the losses and the cause of their occurrence. In this paper we first investigated the various energy loss components in a differential drive robot and presented a well-defined and a complete energy model. In order to validate our model we moved the robot with a specific velocity profile and measured all the losses.