Energy Consumption of a Hexspider Robot-o as Function of Footwear

and Underground: Experimental Investigations

Bernhard Heiden

1,3 a

, Christian A. Koren

1 b

, Volodymyr Alieksieiev

2 c

and Bianca Tonino-Heiden

3 d

Industrial Engineering and Management Studiengang, University of Applied Sciences, Europastrasse 4, Villach, Austria

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Leibniz University Hannover, An der Universit

at 1, Garbsen, Germany

Philosophy Institute, University of Graz, Heinrichstraße 26/V, Graz, Austria

Keywords:

Logistics, Multirobots, Selforganisation, Educational Tool, IoT Application, Robot-o, Spiderino.

Abstract:

In this paper, the previously designed and implemented spiderino robot-o, or a robot used to act in a swarm

for educational purposes, is investigated regarding his energy-consuming properties. An experimental setup

consists of a platform inside which the spiderino robot-o can freely move with a ﬁxed random movement

program. Furthermore, the robot-o feet were equipped with footwear made of materials with different friction

coefﬁcients, non-equipped or plastics, equipped with cork, equipped with rubber, and the underground was

chosen to be stone, wood, plastics, and with regard to ﬂoor inclination for all variants ﬂat and for the stone

variant also inclined by 10%. The results show a characteristic curve in energy consumption according to a

slightly different behaviour concerning the material combinations of footwear and ﬂoor, which adapts energy

consumption physically due to the speciﬁc footwear-underground combination.

1 INTRODUCTION

Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) or devices are usually

controlled by microcontrollers, as the widely used Ar-

duino platform, which is comprehensively described

in (Borchers, 2013).

In Internet of Things (IoT) systems on the other

hand, or systems that are widely connected, and that

are usually a CPS, the energy consumption is of great

importance, because of battery need, long term unas-

sisted usage and independent operation. A theoretical

approach how to reduce energy efforts in IoT systems

is done in (Demigha and Khalﬁ, 2019) by means of

a linear temporal logic approach, which allows for

exhaustive investigation of possibilities by creating

Kripke automata, Petri nets, ﬁnite state automata etc.

In this paper, however, we investigate a speciﬁc ap-

plied and related to mechanical experimentations ap-

proach of the question of how to reduce the amount of

used energy as a function of material surface contact

pairing parameters.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8324-6505

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3036-4046

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0792-3740

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7648-2833

In education the approach of using low cost swarm

robots (Elmenreich et al., 2015; M. Jdeed, 2017) is

used, which we call here spiderino robot-o, directing

to an orgiton of i-th order, which is a cybernetic unit of

a robot, that acts in a swarm as a ‘hyper-organism’ (cf.

also (Heiden and Tonino-Heiden, 2022a; Heiden and

Tonino-Heiden, 2022b)). A theoretical and numer-

ical study has been done on the ‘spiderin-o’ to invest-

igate a minimal communication experimental setup

with sensors and actuators consisting of emitted and

observed LEDs (Heiden et al., 2021a).

The spiderino robot-o is as well an educational

tool as a prototype for industrial production. Once es-

tablished, a lot of applications are available. Classes

from all ages can be taught and further on an im-

plementation in the school and university system in

assisting with easy to medium tasks developed. Ba-

sics kits of spiderin-os or spiderino robot-os should

be given for the teaching system.

Content. In this paper we give in Section 1 the goal

of the paper. In Section 2 we explain the position of

this paper. In Section 3 we describe the spiderino

robot-o that we investigate. In Section 4 we look

at the experimental setup, ﬁrst in Section 4.1 giving

Heiden, B., Koren, C., Alieksieiev, V. and Tonino-Heiden, B.

Energy Consumption of a Hexspider Robot-o as Function of Footwear and Underground: Experimental Investigations.

DOI: 10.5220/0011090400003194

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security (IoTBDS 2022), pages 267-273

ISBN: 978-989-758-564-7; ISSN: 2184-4976

267

general considerations, then in Section 4.2 the exper-

imental results of energy consumption by comparison

of different footwear. In Section 4.3 we are looking

at the energy consumption measured by comparison

of different ﬂoors, and in 4.4 at possible logistics ap-

plications to this now educational approach, in future

also applying to industrial and societal technological

applications. In Section 5 we draw conclusions, and

in Section 6 we give a summary and an outlook to

the energy consumption of the spiderino robot-o and

related research and application approaches.

Goal. The goal of this paper is to investigate the en-

ergy consumption of a spiderino educational robot,

here referred to as spiderino robot-o, as a function

of different varying environmental conditions with re-

gard to friction, and plane inclination.

2 POSITION

The position of this paper is that we can inﬂuence

the energy consumption of a spiderino robot-o to re-

duce energy usage in general by means of mechan-

ical friction surface pairs. We further assume that the

hypothesis is true, that we can discriminate by suit-

able measurement the effects that have signiﬁcant im-

pact on energy consumption and that we can optimise

the energy consumption of the spiderino robot-o with

regard to the surface conditions by a suitable equip-

ment, which is in our case footwear, by this inﬂu-

encing a pairing of two contacting surface materials

in the spiderino robot-o environment relative motion

problem.

3 BACKGROUND: ROBOT-O

When we regard a robot-o we regard different levels

of organisation. This can be seen, as different

identical spiderin-os which then lead to a group of

interacting systems which would be the ﬁrst consid-

eration of a spiderino robot-o

i=0 relating to a single

and i=1 to, e.g. a group. In our investigation we re-

gard another differentiation, of a robot-o, and this is

one spiderino, with regard to different alternating con-

ditions, of his footwear, or exchangeable outﬁt, and a

ﬁxed nearby environment, the different ﬂoors. The

other one is the far distant environment or the outside

of the experimental situation window. This ‘window’

can be regarded as the cage in which the spiderin-o,

is allowed to move (see Figure 2), which is then the

observed room, or the system-border, in this case of

the experimental setup. So what we get is an orgiton

of a combinatorial setting of near and distant envir-

onment, which could be indicated by two indices in

our investigation. The spiderin-o

relates then to a

as the type of footwear, and b to the type of ground.

In fact the intermission of a ‘wear’, changes the rela-

tion of a system to its environment. On the one side

it is a shield, increasing some kind of ‘distance’, as

well as physical conditions, like the weight increase.

So this interaction relationship changes, with regard

to friction, as we had intended to investigate in the

experimental setup. The friction µ

a,b

, is the physical

bidirectional interaction variable. Here we investig-

ate this relation to the total Energy consumption E for

movement for the spiderino, which hence can also be

regarded as an optimisation problem of movement of

a body, a robot-o as a function of µ

a,b

. The problem

formulation is hence according to equation (1),

E(µ

a,b

)

= opt (1)

where the sign ‘!’ translates for ‘it should be’ and

the phrase ‘opt’ for ‘optimum value’, which is a min-

imum in this case, as the minimum conditions for en-

ergy consumption of the robot-o shall be met, or max-

imum with regard to time, or distance covered.

4 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

In this Section we give ﬁrst some considerations, then

the results with regard to energy consumption of the

measurements and later on how the spiderino can be

related to industrial applications.

4.1 General Considerations

Concerning the experimental setup as indicated

earlier, different combinations of material of the foot-

wear a and the grounding b were done. The footwear

was a=standard plastic, cork, rubber. The ground was

b=wood, stone, carpet, and with regard to inclination

10%. The inclination was tried to be steeper but it

turned out that a steeper gradient had led to instable

movement of the robot-o so that it turned over in that

case. So we restricted the experimental setup to an in-

clination that was save enough for constant safe con-

tinuous movement in all directions. In any case the

movement of the spiderino can be regarded randomly,

due to the experimental setup.

IoTBDS 2022 - 7th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security

268

Figure 1: Robot-o with standard, cork, and rubber footwear

from left to right according to (Koren, 2021) .

Figure 2: Robot-o platform and measurement according to

(Koren, 2021) .

4.2 Comparison of Different Footwear

and Floors

In Figures 3-9 the different footwear of the robot-o

is shown for all the different ﬂoors, as well as the

consideration of 10% inclination for stone ﬂoor. As

a result we can see a wide spread in results for the

standard footwear and a low for rubber on different

grounds. Rubber seems to be equilibrating the results

as was the case with the effect of inclination and the

domination of gravitation over other effects. Hence it

seems that in the speciﬁc material pair combinations

rubber has a dominating effect as material. In general

the wooden ﬂoor is best, except with rubber footwear,

here there has occurred an inversion, the stone ﬂoor is

relatively best according to Figure 9.

4.3 Energy Consumption

When we look at the energy consumption of the

robot-o we would have to know the velocity of move-

ment, and when we assume it as constant, then we

have a mean constant increase in height and the height

would be like in equation (2) proportional to t.

h ∼ t → E ∼ t (2)

Now when we assume E to be the potential energy

E = E

pot

+ E

= m · g · (h + x) (3)

then it follows

m · g

∼ t ∼ (h + x) (4)

Now having two robot-os with different mass m

, due to their footwear as in the experiments, and

also different Energies E

, E

, we get the relation at

the same time:

∼

(5)

When we take 1 for standard and 2 for rubber or

cork: m

=119 g and m

= 120 g then

∼

· E

(6)

= γ ·

· E

= γ

∗

· E

(7)

From the experiments we get γ

∗

=1.0005 in Figure

6. The measurements of the masses are at least in the

same measurement range of the measurement instru-

ment (+-1g), that there would be necessary a more

accurate measurement, and hence the factor m

can not be determined from the data correctly oth-

erwise. The measured data indicate that there is a

homogenisation of the inclination, which means that

the effect of the used materials is smaller compared

to energy consumption. Anyhow, it seems to get im-

proved by means of elastic feet, relatively. The homo-

genisation, might also have occurred due to the slight

mass increase of the rubber and cork footwear variant

compared to the no-extra footwear variant, but this

should be re-evaluated after having done more accur-

ate measurements, due to the above given argumenta-

tion.

4.4 Logistics Applications

A model of the spiderino robot-o, presented in this

paper, can be seen as a basic scalable system for a

wide variety of applications (cf. also (Heiden et al.,

2020)). One of the most important application ﬁelds

of such a robot-o is, e.g. logistics. In view of ac-

tual trends towards autonomous vehicle systems, the

upscaled spiderino robot-o can take over transport as-

sistant tasks for industrial and private purposes. Tak-

ing into account its advantages while driving on dif-

ference surfaces and with different types of footwear

as well as its spider-like construction, it can poten-

tially be used, e.g. for private mobility assistance.

In (B

osch et al., 2018) a cost-performance analysis

Energy Consumption of a Hexspider Robot-o as Function of Footwear and Underground: Experimental Investigations

269

Voltage [V]

standard feet

cork feet

rubber feet

time [s]

Figure 3: Robot-o on wooden ﬂoor with different footwear according to (Koren, 2021).

Figure 4: Robot-o on carpet ﬂoor with different footwear according to (Koren, 2021).

of different autonomous mobility services was carried

out, which emphasises beneﬁcial usage of private mo-

bility robots in the future. In addition to this, good en-

ergy performance of the described robot, while mov-

ing on the stone surfaces, allows to suggest, that it can

also be used in the industrial context, e.g. for transport

operations in mining industry (Corke et al., 1998) for

discussion of robotics application in mining industry).

Overcoming of slopes can also be a topic of interest

for future research. In case of a possible decrease of

energy consumption, while overcoming different in-

clinations, the construction of a scaled robot-o, espe-

cially with spider-like feet, can be an advantage, e.g.

for stair climbing solutions (cf. also (Heiden et al.,

2021b)).

IoTBDS 2022 - 7th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security

270

Voltage [V]

standard feet

cork feet

rubber feet

time [s]

standard feet

cork feet

rubber feet

Figure 5: Robot-o on stone ﬂoor with different footwear according to (Koren, 2021).

5 CONCLUSIONS AND

DISCUSSION

In this paper the energy consumption of a spiderino

robot-o was investigated in dependence of different

footwear materials and different ﬂoor types. For this

purpose, the discharge rate of the 3.7-volt Li-Po bat-

tery, which is the energy source of the spiderino robot-

o, was analysed and the voltage values depending on

time have been measured (V(t)). It has to be men-

tioned that rubber feet showed slightly outperforming

results on the carpet ﬂoor and signiﬁcantly outgoes

other feet materials on the stone ﬂoor. In addition

to this, it has been shown, that the spiderino robot-

o masters the 10% inclination in a relatively similar

fashion with different footwear.

Due to the manual evaluation of experimental res-

ults, the differentiation between many value curves

is not explicitly noticeable. For a future better dif-

ferentiated measurement, devices with higher preci-

sion should be used, which can be also followed

from the achieved measurement accuracy according

to measurement equipment speciﬁcations (see Figure

10). Furthermore, the spiderino robot-o can poten-

tially be scaled up for the purpose of industrial or

private logistics applications as described in Section

4.4.

As from the reviewers was asked what the explan-

ation is for the time period of two hours the answer is

due to at least two reasons. First, this time is related to

the battery time that is possible for one experimental

run with this battery type. Second the measurements

were made, although originally planned with another

measurement device, with a manually to be operated

device, and synchronised with a handy video observa-

tion time measurement, which was transcribed manu-

ally. The work was done 2021 in the course of the

summer semester.

6 SUMMARY, AND OUTLOOK

In this Section we ﬁrst give a summary and then an

outlook.

Spiderino – Summary. The spiderino robot-o is an

improved and modiﬁed toy robot, which has been

equipped with an Arduino board to fulﬁl special mis-

sions. It has been tested on different ground levels

and how it ‘reacts’ to an ascent. In the undertaken ex-

periments the shoes have been alternated or changed

as well as the different grounds. The measurements

with an upgraded 3.7-volt Li-Po battery have been re-

corded and evaluated concerning its battery discharge.

After the approximately two hours of measurements,

the battery status has been nearly the same level of

discharge at all ground levels, which is explainable

Energy Consumption of a Hexspider Robot-o as Function of Footwear and Underground: Experimental Investigations

271

Voltage [V]

standard feet

cork feet

rubber feet

time [s]

standard feet

cork feet

rubber feet

Figure 6: Robot-o on stone ﬂoor with 10% inclination with different footwear according to (Koren, 2021).

time [s]

wooden

ﬂoor

stone

ﬂoor

carpet

ﬂoor

10% inclination

stone ﬂoor

Voltage [V]

Figure 7: Robot-o on different ﬂoors with standard footwear

according to (Koren, 2021).

by a discharging curve leading to the horizontal axis.

Outlook. More measurements and experience data

should be collected and displayed, especially about

the direct inﬂuence of friction on the discharge

amount and how the various friction pair correspond

to each other. Further the comparison between the

friction pairs should be investigated, and whether they

make a difference, as well as the correlation from the

friction coefﬁcient and the speciﬁc ground level and

how the discharging level coheres with friction.

Research question of interests would also be how

the movement pattern for different inclinations looks

like in comparison to the planar levels, especially with

new leg and body constructions.

As we have looked in our investigation at indoor

materials, also outdoor materials should be addressed

time [s]

wooden

ﬂoor

stone

ﬂoor

carpet

ﬂoor

10% inclination

stone ﬂoor

Voltage [V]

Figure 8: Robot-o on different ﬂoors with cork footwear

according to (Koren, 2021).

Voltage [V]

time [s]

wooden

ﬂoor

stone

ﬂoor

carpet

ﬂoor

10% inclination

stone ﬂoor

Figure 9: Robot-o on different ﬂoors with rubber footwear

according to (Koren, 2021).

in future research. According to the geometry of the

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272

Voltage [V]

time [s]

wooden ﬂoor - standard feet

Figure 10: Robot-o on wooden ﬂoor with standard feet ac-

cording to (Koren, 2021) and expected measurement accur-

acy.

spiderino robot-o, here the speciﬁc difﬁculty of dif-

ferently inclined movement could also be investigated

and how this could be overcome and or compensated

for successful movement, with possibly then very dif-

ferent types of spiderino robot-os or environmentally

suitably adapted robot-os in general.

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