Battery Recharge while in Operation harmful?

Hi,

According to the Battery Maintenance Guide, it is recommended to shut the robot down entirely for charging after untethered operations. Usually, this is doable.

However, for a planned data acquisition process of air quality, I want the robot to drive down a specific small route every 30 minutes for 5-10 mins. The robot should do this for 48 hours in total. So the only way I see to realize this, is by driving back the robot to the docking station for charging after each data acquisition tour. That way the robot should always be fully charged before the next tour.

This means though, that the robot will be charged while being on. Is this harmful for the battery? To minimize damage, I could put off everything in standby except the Ubuntu system itself, if there’s any benefit in doing so.

Thanks in advance!
Noor

Hi Noor,

Good question! You should be able to charge the battery while the robot is on without any harmful effects. In the Battery Maintenance Guide you linked, there is a section that describes charging the robot while tethered - in the use case you describe, you are essentially tethering the robot every 30 minutes.

While the robot is powered on, we recommend using the 12V Supply mode on the charger, rather than the AGM mode that we recommend when the robot is off. This is what I would suggest for your application. AGM mode can be less unreliable when the robot is on, as the power draw from the compute and components can occasionally confuse the battery management system in this mode; Supply mode will yield more consistent behavior.

Hi @bmatulevich,

Thanks for your quick response! I see. I so far thought that the Supply mode is only usable when the robot is used in tethered mode and thus can’t be plugged out without shutting the machine down first.

That’s good news :slight_smile: I will try charging every 30 mins in Supply mode then for my experiment.

Thanks again chief :wink:

Noor