Scheduling Tasks to a Team of Autonomous Mobile Service Robots in Indoor Enviroments

Hartmut Surmann (Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS), Schloss Birlinghoven, Germany)

Antonio Morales (Jaume-I University, Robotic Intelligence Laboratory, Campus Riu Sec, Spain)

Abstract: This paper presents a complete system for scheduling transportation orders to a fleet of autonomous mobile robots in service environments. It consists of the autonomous mobile robots, a user friendly interface to acquire the orders for the robots via internet and to store them in a database, a general language for modeling multistorey buildings with XML and the scheduling algorithms. The model description of the buildings is used to plan the paths for the robots and to estimate the cost and times for the orders. One challenging key problem - the multi robot cooperation - is solved by the scheduling algorithms and by giving autonomy to the service robots.

Keywords: Job scheduling, NP-hard problems, XML, autonomous mobile service robots, robot teams human machine interface (HMI), telerobotics

Categories: D.4.1, I.2.9