Planning, Scheduling, and Plan Execution for Autonomous Robot Office Couriers

Abstract

Scheduling the tasks of an autonomous robot office courier and carrying out the scheduled tasks reliably and efficiently pose challenging problems for autonomous robot control. The controller has to accomplish longterm efficiency rather than optimize problem-solving episodes. It also has to exploit opportunities and avoid problems flexibly because often the robot is forced to generate schedules based on partial information. We propose to implement the controller for scheduled activity by employing concurrent reactive plans that reschedule the course of action whenever necessary and while performing their actions. The plans are represented modularly and transparently to allow for easy transformation. Scheduling and schedule repair methods are implemented as plan transformation rules. Introduction To carry out their jobs reliably and efficiently many autonomous mobile service robots acting in human working environments have to view their jobs as everyday activity. We consider a particul...