Multi-Robot Work Assignment Methods for Effectiveness Improvement of Deploying Service Robots

Service robot is an emerging robotic application. To be approved as an assistant or replacement for human employee, the robots should be able to solve team-level task effectively and thereby achieve high productivity. With regarded to the point, work assignment mechanism for multiple robots is essential. This paper originally gives a novel definition of effectiveness of deploying service robots from the viewpoint of multi-robot management, and then proposes a pack of multi-robot work assignment methods to improve the effectiveness by making service robots more accessible to the people who want to or are willing to use service robots. Simulation results demonstrated an improvement in the effectiveness of service deployment especially for application scenarios where the possibility of robot users is geographically uneven or changes over time.