A Study on an Automatic Recharging System for a Mobile Robot

• Main Authors: Qian-Te Zeng, 曾乾特
• Other Authors: Kuan-Yu Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/55931983397107132086

碩士 === 中原大學 === 機械工程研究所 === 100 === Abstract The purpose of this dissertation is to develop an automatic recharging system for a mobile robot, including the design of recharging station, battery voltage measurement, and automatic docking system. Here, the automatic recharging system is integrated into a mobile robot with capabilities of building patrol and obstacle avoidance to expand its working ability. Based on the information of built-in maps and motor encoders, the robot can know its location and distance between itself and the recharging station when it executes the task of building portal. If an obstacle appears on the forward path during patrol, the robot can detect the width of the obstacle and distances between the obstacle and two side walls by sonar sensors. Therefore, a forward path will be re-planned and the robot can avoid the obstacle to continue patrol. However, when a low battery voltage condition is sensed, the robot must make a decision to suspend the patrol and returns to the recharging station for recharging. In this study, a specific location sign is installed at the recharging station to compensate the position error caused by the motor driver system and other factors. In other words, when the robot arrives near the recharging station, it can find the location sign by its vision system. Then the robot can accurately move to the front of the recharging station by using the stereo vision algorithm to estimate the distance. Finally, the robot performs the procedure of automatic docking system to connect into recharging socket for recharging. To confirm the proposed approach, some experiments have been done. The experimental results show that the proposed automatic recharging system can successfully control the robot to move back and dock in the recharging station itself for recharging.