Authors:
Seohyun Jeon
and
Jaeyeon Lee
Affiliation:
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Korea, Republic of
Keyword(s):
Hospital, Logistics, Delivery, Robot, Unstable, Network.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Autonomous Agents
;
Control and Supervision Systems
;
Distributed Control Systems
;
Industrial Automation and Robotics
;
Industrial Engineering
;
Industrial Networks and Automation
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization
;
Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems
;
Network Robotics
;
Robotics and Automation
Abstract:
This paper describes the problem about controlling multiple robots in a real world when the network connection
is unstable. Robots are deployed at the hospital for delivery service. Robots navigate autonomously
through the hospital-wide hallway while delivering items from point to point. The delivery task is assigned
and sent to the robot by the server via wireless network. To increase the performance of using fleet of robots,
online task assignment and fleet optimization is required. However, the robots are frequently disconnected
with the network since the robot continuously moves and the mission area covers multiple floors. The online
communication cannot be guaranteed at all times. Therefore, this paper proposes a control architecture to cope
with such unstable network connectivity. The server has a specific message board to communicate with the
robot. Task assignment of the server or status report of the robot are transferred through this message board.
In general, the
server uses a fixed IP address, whereas a robot uses a dynamic IP address. Therefore, the
connection is always initiated from the robot’s side by the heartbeat message. With this architecture, the communication
between the server and the robot can be achieved in a partially online network environment. And,
the delivery performance of the fleet of robots can be increased by the scheduler assigning the task online.
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