Operation Planning for Multiple Robotic Arms with The Total Energy Constraint

Abstract

Wire-free robot not using wires between links is proposed by utilizing wireless power transmission and communication. Attaching and detaching the links easily enable to install the arms into a facility on demand. Considering power supplied by the facility is limited, however, all of the robotic arms might not execute their task at same time. The worst case is whole system might shut down at the moment of task execution. This paper focuses on an operation planning method allowing the robot arms to execute their tasks under the total power constraints. Supposing that multiple arms control their end-effectors to follow given trajectories, instantaneous power can be discretized by considering only peak powers in each trajectory. Consequently, the operation planning problem is given as a solution to an integer programming by our method. As a merit of our method, the controllers programmed already on board of the arms need not to be changed, but to add a program solving the integer programming. The operation planning method is evaluated by a numerical simulation in this paper. This paper describes application requirements and its performance.