Design and Control of an Automatic Battery Swapping System Based on Sliding Mechanism for a Mobile Robot

In this research, we designed and controlled an automatic battery swapping system based on a sliding mechanism, intended for use in mobile robots. The system removes the case holding exhausted battery from a robot, replaces it with a charged one, and returns the case to the robot. To ensure stability, the case loader of the system grabs the case holding the battery rather than the battery itself. The system’s controller manages the servo motors of the loader and the sliding mechanism through half-duplex communication. Since the controller operates on ROS (Robot Operating System), it can readily swap batteries for any mobile robots running ROS and using batteries of the same size.