Determining the fleet size of mobile robots with energy constraints

Abstract

As robotics technologies improve, mobile robots can be used in many applications. A fundamental question is to decide the number of robots needed (i.e., the "fleet-size problem") to accomplish tasks. Previous studies did not consider the energy constraints of the fleet size problem. In this paper, we present a probabilistic method to decide the fleet size for serving random requests. A simplification method is provided for fast computation. Our method is computationally efficient, with an average of 4% errors validated by an event-driven simulator.