Postdisaster Electric Power Recovery Using Autonomous Vehicles

This paper presents an architecture for the development of mobile microgrids using autonomous vehicles for the recovery of electrical power in postdisaster scenarios. The goal is to facilitate the integration of the different disciplines involved and address interrelated challenges in interaction between the disparate components of the system and the physical world. The architecture described in this paper has emerged through a combination of hardware development and experimental studies. The proposed layout will create an autonomous mobile microgrid system consisting of a team of ground robots capable of navigating in a disaster-affected area, making electrical connections, and supplying and controlling the electrical power needed by the loads in the area. This system has the scalability characteristics of an ad hoc system and can reconfigure itself depending on the changes in demanded performance of the microgrid.