A Novel Real-Time Mission Scheduler for Energy Neutral Autonomous Mobile Robots

Energy harvesting robots are those that have been outfitted with technology, enabling them to draw and store energy from their surroundings in order to power their functions. This creative method offers more sustainability and autonomy. Intelligent Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) should be designed to navigate in dynamic and unpredictable environments that may alter the structure of workloads during run time. This challenge is amplified when deadline constrained robotic missions should executed timely by an AMR supplied by intermittent renewable energy source. In this paper, we introduce ED-H, an energy aware real-time scheduling approach able to support online changing multi-mission workloads. At the core of ED-H, lies the classical Earliest Deadline First (EDF) priority assignment policy combined with a smart robot power management policy. The experimentations demonstrate flexibility and performance of the ED-H approach even if progress is still expected in the area of energy management for industrial AMRs.