Design of Powered Floor Systems for Mobile Robots with Differential Evolution

Abstract

Mobile robots depend on power for performing their task. Powered floor systems, i.e., surfaces with conductive strips alternatively connected to the two poles of a power source, are a practical and effective way for supplying power to robots without interruptions, by means of sliding contacts. Deciding where to place the sliding contacts so as to guarantee that a robot is actually powered irrespective of its position and orientation is a difficult task. We here propose a solution based on Differential Evolution: we formally define problem-specific constraints and objectives and we use them for driving the evolutionary search. We validate experimentally our proposed solution by applying it to three real robots and by studying the impact of the main problem parameters on the effectiveness of the evolved designs for the sliding contacts. The experimental results suggest that our solution may be useful in practice for assisting the design of powered floor systems.

A Complete Framework for the Synthesis of Powered Floor Systems

“…It should be noted at this point that, in this work, we focus on patterns of arrays based on regular polygons; however, the mathematical framework which is highlighted in III and the related methodology are general and can be applied with minimal modifications to arrays of arbitrary geometry. For example, [30] describes a method for the automatic design of arrays of contacts based on evolutionary computation and built on a simplified version of the framework presented in this paper.…”

Evolutionary optimization of sliding contact positions in powered floor systems for mobile robots

“…The present work is based in part on a preliminary study by the same authors [7]. We here extend the cited paper along many lines: (i) we propose a new solution representation that can exploit existing symmetries in the robot shape and validate on three real robotic platforms (Thymio II, mBot, and Elisa-3); (ii) we describe a new quantitative objective that measures to which degree the contact positions result in a balanced power delivery between positive and negative poles; (iii) we conduct a more detailed discussion of the experimental results, including a deeper comparison of the different design choices; and (iv) we present a prototype implementation of a powered floor system based on one of the commercial robots used in the method experimentation.…”