SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT PATH OF AN AUTONOMOUS DEVICE

• US 20180004198A1
• Filed: 06/28/2017
• Published: 01/04/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 06/30/2016
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Advanced Digital Broadcast SA (Advanced Digital Broadcast Holdings SA)
• Original Assignee: Advanced Digital Broadcast SA (Advanced Digital Broadcast Holdings SA)
• Inventors: DABROWSKI, Bartosz
• Granted Patent: US 10,037,027 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• CPC Class Codes: G05D 1/0005 with arrangements to save energy
• CPC Class Codes: G05D 1/0217 in accordance with energy consumption, time reduction or distance reduction criteria
• CPC Class Codes: G05D 1/0219 ensuring the processing of the whole working surface
• CPC Class Codes: G05D 1/024 in combination with a laser lasers per se H01S
• CPC Class Codes: G05D 1/0274 using mapping information stored in a memory device navigation using map-matching G01C21/30

Abstract

A method for determining an energy-efficient path of an autonomous device wherein said autonomous device moves over a global grid of cells into which a given operating area has been split, the method being characterized in that determination of said energy-efficient path comprises the steps of: processing of the current cell (201); taking a measurement σ of the processing (202); classifying the measurement σ to be of a particular level Σ (203), taking into account a predefined division, of the measurements results range, into a plurality of measurements levels; storing said classified measurement in a memory of the autonomous device (204) and associating it with the current cell; selecting a reference probability grid (205); updating (207) the probabilities by applying the reference grid (100) to the global grid at its current position such that every cell on the reference grid (100) corresponds unambiguously to one cell on the global grid;

and moving the autonomous device to a next cell of the global grid (208) and setting said next cell as the current cell (201) in order to process the next cell.

Claims

1. A method for determining an energy-efficient path of an autonomous device wherein said autonomous device moves over a global grid of cells into which a given operating area has been split, the method being characterized in that determination of said energy-efficient path comprises the steps of:

processing of the current cell (201);

taking a measurement σ

of the processing (202);

classifying the measurement σ

to be of a particular level Σ

(203), taking into account a predefined division, of the measurements results range, into a plurality of measurements levels;

storing said classified measurement in a memory of the autonomous device (204) and associating it with the current cell;

selecting a reference probability grid (205) wherein values in the cells of the reference grid express a probability that the measurement of the processing (202) will be the same in its respective cell as it is in the current cell (103), which represents the current position of the autonomous device, whereas a centre cell, associated with the current cell (103), is assigned a maximum probability while other cells within the reference grid (100) have a probability assigned, which lowers with an increase of a distance of a cell from the current cell (103);

updating (207) the probabilities by applying the reference grid (100) to the global grid at its current position such that every cell on the reference grid (100) corresponds unambiguously to one cell on the global grid; and

moving the autonomous device to a next cell of the global grid (208) and setting said next cell as the current cell (201) in order to process the next cell.

2. The method according to claim 1 characterized in that taking a measurement σ

of the processing comprises a battery level decrease in the cell.

3. The method according to claim 1 characterized in that cells of the global grid have a hexagonal shape or an irregular rectangular shape.

4. The method according to claim 1 characterized in that initially a probability in all cells of the global grid is set to 0.

5. The method according to claim 1 characterized in that the step of updating the probabilities comprises for each measurement level Σ

ε

{1,2, . . . , L} and for each processing mε

{1,2, . . . , M} the probability p[Σ

, m] is assigned a new value that is;

greater or equal to p[Σ

, m] if σ

ε

Σ

smaller or equal to p[Σ

, m] if σ

∉

Σ

6. The method according to claim 1 characterized in that the applying the reference grid (100) to the global grid at its current position takes into account the centre cell of the reference grid.

7. The method according to claim 1 characterized in that the method further comprises the steps of:

selecting (301) a global grid'"'"'s cell that is reachable;

computing (302) a predicted measurement, for the selected reachable cell, the predicted measurement being dependent on the measurement values, of the same kind, stored in the global grid (120);

determining (303) whether there are more reachable cells available and if there are, executing the selecting step (301) in order to select the next reachable cell and otherwise selecting (304) a next cell for processing.

8. The method according to claim 7 characterized in that the predicted measurement is computed as a weighted sum p′

[Σ

, m] being a normalized value of p[Σ

, m];

9. A non-transitory computer readable medium storing computer-executable instructions performing all the steps of the computer-implemented method according to claim 1 when executed on a computer.