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Mobile Robot Task Planning and Scheduling in Retirement Homes
Members
J. Christopher Beck
Goldie Nejat
Kyle E. C. Booth
Tony T. Tran
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Project description
We study the planning and scheduling of single and multi-robot fleets to be deployed within retirement homes. Such
robots must autonomously organize and facilitate a variety of group and individual activities (i.e. bingo games,
telepresence activities) within the facility for a group of human users (residents). The problem of assigning tasks
to robots can be thought of as an instance of multi-robot task allocation (MRTA), with an additional scheduling component
(determining specific task start times).
Within this project, we investigate the use of various combinatorial optimization technologies, including mixed-integer programming (MIP)
and constraint programming (CP), to solve the underlying MRTA problem. We also investigate a number of more sophisticated techniques to improve
the efficiency at which high quality solutions are generated, including variable ordering heuristics, local search procedures, and problem-specific
decompositions. The developed models are integrated within real-world
robot architectures and physically validated at our facility at the University of Toronto, with plans for deployment in
real retirement homes within Toronto.
Start date
September 2014
Funding
Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
Dr. Robot Inc.
Canada Research Chairs (CRC) Program
University of Toronto Fellowship
TIDEL Research Assistantship
Ontario Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology (OGSST)
Publications
- Tran, T.T., Vaquero, T., Nejat, G., & Beck J.C., Robots in Retirement Homes: Applying Off-the-Shelf Planning and Scheduling to a Team of Assistive Robots, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 58, 523-590, 2017.
- Booth, K.E.C., Nejat, G., & Beck, J.C., "A Constraint Programming Approach to Multi-Robot Task Allocation and Scheduling in Retirement Homes", Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, (CP2016), 539-555, 2016.
- Booth, K.E.C., Tran, T.T., Nejat, G., & Beck J.C., Mixed-Integer and Constraint Programming Techniques for Mobile Robot Task Planning, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 1(1), 500-507, 2016.
- Louie, W.-Y.G., Vaquero, T.S., Nejat, G., & Beck, J.C., "An Autonomous Assistive Robot for Planning, Scheduling and Facilitating Multi-User Activities", Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, (ICRA2014), 5292-5298, 2014.
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