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.

翻译：摘要：本文针对执行长期持续性任务的自主机器人团队，提出了一种调度协议。所提出的框架称为meSch，考虑了机器人有限的电池容量以及单个充电站的存在，并实现了以下贡献：1）首先，它保证一次只能有一台机器人独占使用充电站；该方法是在线的，适用于一般非线性机器人模型，不需要机器人在不同时间部署，并且能够处理具有不同放电速率的机器人。2）其次，我们考虑了充电站可移动且存在不确定性的场景。该方法确保机器人能够在考虑充电站位置不确定性的情况下与之会合。最后，我们通过仿真和实验案例研究评估了meSch的有效性。