A multi-robot task planning system minimizing the total execution time for hospital service

Abstract

A multi-robot task planning system is developed to minimize the total execution time for autonomous service robots in hospitals, which is essential for `autonomous generation of task commands' as an approach toward human-friendly human-robot interaction. In traditional approaches, a task planning system based on STRIPS (Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver) representation is widely used. Also the temporal planning is one of the issues in task planning area, since it still suffers some problems for single robots, and also it is not easy to apply to multi-robot environment yet. For our objective, we propose a new representation, named variable representation, based on STRIPS representation for specifying states and actions. Then we apply the A* algorithm for iterative search and extend for multi-robot task planning system. In order to guarantee safety, the multi-robot task planning system needs to check robots' collisions and should avoid robots' collisions. We propose collision check and avoidance algorithm, and integrate to the multi-robot task planning system.