Low-power Energy Management Module for Ambiently Powered Robotic Swarms

This paper presents an Energy Management Module (EMM) designed for low-power ambiently powered robotic swarms that harvest energy from the environment in addition to the conventional charging methods. The EMM is designed to cooperate with a scheduling architecture that coordinates tasks across the Ambiently Powered Swarm Robots. This module helps the scheduler to have more flexible control over the robot's energy storage and consumption. Key functionalities of the proposed EMM include real-time monitoring of energy level, low-power schedulable idle period, monitoring of efficient energy harvesting mechanisms, dead-battery robot recovery, and providing hard reset ability of the robots. The module provides an extra low-power wireless connection to the robots. In collaboration with the EMM, the scheduler manages energy consumption across the swarm and prevents individual robots from exhausting their energy reserves in idle periods, dead battery mode, and malfunctioning. To validate the effectiveness of the EMM, experiments are conducted in both simulated and real-world environments, demonstrating improvements in mission endurance, task completion rates, and overall swarm performance. Results indicate that the EMM effectively extends mission duration and enhances operational efficiency compared to baseline approaches.