Co-operative robot teams in a hospital environment

Abstract

Co-operative teams of service robots have been a research target for several years. Real-time task distribution and scheduling was identified to be one of the key challenges for these robot teams. This paper introduces the application of a team of service robots within hospital environments. Existing approaches for task distribution and scheduling, like central and distributed scheduling for the particular scenario, are introduced. Finally an adapted approach for the scenario is presented. The underlying task distribution problem however differs from known problems, since scheduling takes the power state and equipment of a robot into account required for each task. This paper introduces the concept of IWARD with a special focus on the benefits of co-operative robot teams performing in hospitals.