  This paper develops a scheduling protocol for a team of autonomous robots
that operate in long-term persistent tasks. The proposed framework, called
meSch, accounts for the robots' limited battery capacity and the presence of a
single charging station, and achieves the following contributions: 1) First, it
guarantees exclusive use of the charging station by one robot at a time; the
approach is online, applicable to general nonlinear robot models, does not
require robots to be deployed at different times, and can handle robots with
different discharge rates. 2) Second, we consider the scenario when the
charging station is mobile and subject to uncertainty. This approach ensures
that the robots can rendezvous with the charging station while considering the
uncertainty in its position. Finally, we provide the evaluation of the efficacy
of meSch in simulation and experimental case studies.
