Battery Life

Published on 2015-03-02 in Pico-Kubik quadruped robot.

I get a lot of questions about how long can those tiny robots go on a single battery charge. And I never know what to say, because it depends on what they are doing and the calculations are difficult. So I decided to try and see.

I’ve set the pure-arduino one, with 180mAh battery, to walk around the table leg in circles at full speed (which is actually pretty slow, with its tiny short legs), and waited until the battery overcharge protection kicked it.

Took exactly 20 minutes – which is what I gave as a guesstimate to the people before.

I also noticed one nice thing in the process. The robot kept on walking around that table leg, and repeated the same circle for those 20 minutes, without spiraling away in any direction, as I expected it to. This means that whatever inaccuracies it has in its measurements, leg inverse kinematics calculations and mechanical skewing of legs, they are all relatively constant and repeatable. That bodes well for implementing navigation for it.

Now I need to make a similar test with the VoCore version, with video streaming running. The VoCore can suck up to 300mA, but that one has a 350mAh battery, so maybe the time will be similar…\

UPDATE: 21 minutes with low-resolution streaming, walking in circles.