Robots in Retirement Homes: Person Search and Task Planning for a Group of Residents by a Team of Assistive Robots

The authors present a general multirobot task planning and execution architecture for a team of heterogeneous mobile robots that interact with multiple human users. The designed architecture is implemented in an environment where such robots provide daily assistance to residents in a retirement home setting. The robots are able to allocate and schedule activities throughout the day and find the appropriate residents with whom to engage in assistive activities. Upon finding users, the robot queries each user for his or her availability and interest in various activities. The authors then use constraint programming within a multirobot task allocation and scheduling system to plan and schedule the robot team to facilitate individual and group activities, ensuring consistency with user-expressed availability and activity preferences. The authors test the components of the architecture on a physical multirobot system to verify the utility of the design. Experiments indicate the design can effectively plan and execute assistive activities for multiple users.