Energy Based Path Planning for a Novel Cabled Robotic System

Cabled robotic systems have been used for a diverse set of applications such as environmental sensing, search and rescue, sports and entertainment and air vehicle simulators. In this paper, we introduce a new cabled robot- Networked Info Mechanical System for Planar actuation (NIMS-PL), with energy profiling capabilities. Accurate energy measurements supported by NIMS-PL enable path planning that optimizes the robot's path subject to an upper bound on energy consumption. We performed extensive empirical validation of the optimized path planning approach in simulation using an environmental sensing application as an example. We also validated the simulation results using NIMS-PL, demonstrating significant improvements in the sensing task when accounting with accurate energy measurements as opposed to Euclidean distance, which is typically used for modeling energy spent in path traversal.