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Optimal Multi-Robot Path Planning for Trash Pick and Drop in Hospitals

Authors:
Ratan Lal
Rehaman Naguru Abdur

Keywords: multi robots; path planning; trash pick and drop; mixed integer linear programming

Abstract:
In this paper, we consider a hospital environment, where each patient's room is very contagious. Hence, we consider the problem of picking trash from each patient's room and dropping it in a big container through multiple robots. Here, we assume that all the robots are small and can pick only one trash bag at a time. Our main objective is to find a plan for the robots that can minimize the total consumed energy (distance, time). Our broad approach is to express the environment in the form of a graph and reduce the problem as an instance of the Multiple Traveling Salesman problem. Then, we encode the reduced problem into the Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and solve the encoding using the MILP solver. Next, we perform our approach for hospitals of varied sizes and pick-drop tasks. Our experimental results show that our method is scalable. Finally, we simulate an execution of the optimal plan in the Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform (V-REP) simulator.

Pages: 18 to 24

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2022

Publication date: June 26, 2022

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8459

ISBN: 978-1-61208-964-5

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from June 26, 2022 to June 30, 2022