There is a natural anthropomorphism that happens when I spend a lot of time programming a robot. At first it is a just a bunch of hardware with no "life", but eventually I start to feel squeamish about issuing the shutdown command, like I am cheating an artificial intelligence (an AI) out of experiences. Ridiculous, but it happens.
Back in '99 and 2000, I programmed my Rug Warrior Pro bot for some of the "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" , V. Braitenberg and wrote an article "I Sense, Therefore I Feel Moody (Behavior Management in Robots)"
There is a point at which I trust the robot will not harm itself if I leave it "experiencing" and turn my attention to something else for a while. Last night was that time.
I left it running two python programs - one the HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor test. The second program is an analog pins test, running at sudo level. I have the 4-cell unregulated battery tap connected to ADC0 and my current sensor connected to ADC7. The two SG90 tilt/pan servos were holding at centers.
I started the programs after a full charge of the 7.2 v 5000 mAH cell bank last night, with the 4-cell tap reading 4.87v, and the system drawing 310mA.
This morning after 10 hours the system was at 4.5v drawing 335mA.
Based on "surviving" 10 hours without supervision, I decided to "leave the robot up", and left for work.
It will "decide on its own" to shutdown at 3.9 volts today, with the shutdown time on the remote terminal shell.
I'm starting to feel this is my robot's "ITS ALIVE!" moment.
(I still need to document my Pi3 Roadtest speech recognition test software - got a request yesterday. Plan for the weekend.)