Environment and Solar Map Construction for Solar-Powered Mobile Systems

Abstract—Energy harvesting using solar panels can significantly increase the operational life of mobile robots. If a map of expected solar gains is available, energy efficient paths can be computed. However, estimating available insolation is a challenging task especially in complex environments. This paper makes two contributions: First, we provide a new method to construct a probabilistic model of the environment using measurements obtained from a simple current sensor attached to the solar panels on a mobile robot. Second, we show this model can be used to perform raytracing and predict the likely insolation collected by the robot at any point. We demonstrate our method on randomly generated simulated environments. We also justify our method with real collected solar data by comparing the constructed height maps with satellite images of the test environments, and by comparing the predicted insolation with the real insolation at withheld positions, in a cross-validation step.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: TROB
• Authors: Patrick A. Plonski, Joshua Vander Hook, Volkan Isler
• Keywords: TROB 2016