Dynamic User Task Scheduling for Mobile Robots

We present our efforts to deploy mobile robots in office environments, focusing in particular on the challenge of planning a schedule for a robot to accomplish user-requested actions. We concretely aim to make our CoBot mobile robots available to execute navigational tasks requested by users, such as telepresence, and picking up and delivering messages or objects at different locations. We contribute an efficient web-based approach in which users can request and schedule the execution of specific tasks. The scheduling problem is converted to a mixed integer programming problem. The robot executes the scheduled tasks using a synthetic speech and touch-screen interface to interact with users, while allowing users to follow the task execution online. Our robot uses a robust Kinect-based safe navigation algorithm, moves fully autonomously without the need to be chaperoned by anyone, and is robust to the presence of moving humans, as well as non-trivial obstacles, such as legged chairs and tables. Our robots have already performed 15km of autonomous service tasks.