Multi-Robot Energy Persistence using Load Sharing for Battery Driven Robots

As mobile robots navigate through a warehouse collecting items from storage locations and transporting them to designated drop-off points, they consume energy. In this paper, we introduce an intelligent Robot Load Sharing (RLS) algorithm designed to minimize energy usage during item transportation within a warehouse by a fleet of mobile robots, ensuring sustained energy levels along their routes. The energy consumption at each time slot is parameterized as a quadratic function of the load and the traveling distance for a team of robots. A load-sharing framework is presented where pairs of off-loading and on-loading robots are selected that decide on their meeting points and the load amount to be shared. Our algorithm is compared with different no-load-sharing scenarios and we observe a significant reduction in the total energy consumption of the warehouse.