Robots in retirement homes: Applying off-the-shelf planning and scheduling to a team of assistive robots

Abstract

We investigate Constraint Programming and Planning Domain Definition Language-based technologies for planning and scheduling multiple robots in a retirement home environment to assist elderly residents. Our robotics problem and investigation into proposed solution approaches provide a real world application of planning and scheduling, while highlighting the different modeling assumptions required to solve such a problem. This information is valuable to the planning and scheduling community as it provides insight into potential application avenues, in particular for robotics problems. Based on empirical results, we conclude that a constraint-based scheduling approach, specifically a decomposition using constraint programming, provides the most promising results for our application.