Study On Path Planning Algorithm For Returning Cleaning Robot To Charge Station

With the development of the robot technology, the robot has been widely applied in many domains. Indoor service robot has been paid more and more attention not only because of their widespread market prospect but also because of their high research values. The indoor service robot replaces person working under no monitoring condition for a long time with rechargeable battery for energy. However, the battery capacity is limited, and most of the service robots in the practical application has been designed detached from the charge station, so, whether the indoor service robot can return to charge station successfully to finish the independence charge before the energy exhaust is the guaranty of the long-term autonomous working and the reflection of its intelligence. This paper consider the problem that the indoor clean robot which is a most representative of indoor service robot needs to return to charge station successfully to finish the independence charge before the energy exhaust, proposal an automatic return charge station strategy.This paper takes the indoor clean robot as the research object, proposal a new auto-return charge station path planning strategy. The main idea of this strategy has been described as follows: When the clean robot moving around in the indoor environment, it uses sensors which carried on itself to sample the actual environment positional coordinate information, then transforms the actual environment position into the corresponding grid information which stored in a special data structure such as a sequential list. Heuristic A* search algorithm has been used to search an optimal return path from the sequential list. This paper describe the realization in detail of the indoor clean robot's auto-return charge station path planning strategy, including the establishment of the grid environment based on sampling during robot traversal, search an optimal return path using the heuristic A* search algorithm, as well as the simulation under the indoor environment, the comparison of the auto-return path planning strategy which this paper proposed with other two commonly used return strategies. Moreover, An electric quantity estimate method has been proposed base on the return strategy.