meSch: Multi-Agent Energy-Aware Scheduling for Task Persistence

This paper develops a scheduling protocol for a team of autonomous robots that operate in long-term persistent tasks. The proposed framework, called meSch, accounts for the robots' limited battery capacity and the presence of a single charging station, and achieves the following contributions: 1) First, it guarantees exclusive use of the charging station by one robot at a time; the approach is online, applicable to general nonlinear robot models, does not require robots to be deployed at different times, and can handle robots with different discharge rates. 2) Second, we consider the scenario when the charging station is mobile and subject to uncertainty. This approach ensures that the robots can rendezvous with the charging station while considering the uncertainty in its position. Finally, we provide the evaluation of the efficacy of meSch in simulation and experimental case studies.