Autonomous Power Grid Formation for Surface Assets Using Multiple Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Cable deployment system for unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) mobile microgrids

“…Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), equipped with energy generation, power control, cable coupling, and routing mechanisms, can establish this power infrastructure and transmission [1]. These autonomous mobile microgrids have many beneficial applications such as military forward operating bases, planetary operating bases, and disaster recovery [2][3][4], relieving humans from the time, effort, and dangers of manually establishing and maintaining these power systems. With the use of light detection and ranging (LiDAR), inertial measurement units (IMU), global positioning systems (GPS), and camera vision, these mobile ground robots can search for a safe path to travel between the nodes, autonomously map their environment, and connect nodes in an electrical microgrid [5].…”