  This paper presents an approach for estimating the operational range for
mobile robot exploration on a single battery discharge. Deploying robots in the
wild usually requires uninterrupted energy sources to maintain the robot's
mobility throughout the entire mission. However, for most endeavors into the
unknown environments, recharging is usually not an option, due to the lack of
pre-installed recharging stations or other mission constraints. In these cases,
the ability to model the on-board energy consumption and estimate the
operational range is crucial to prevent running out of battery in the wild. To
this end, this work describes our recent findings that quantitatively break
down the robot's on-board energy consumption and predict the operational range
to guarantee safe mission completion on a single battery discharge cycle. Two
range estimators with different levels of generality and model fidelity are
presented, whose performances were validated on physical robot platforms in
both indoor and outdoor environments. Model performance metrics are also
presented as benchmarks.
