Task scheduling for mobile robots using interval algebra

Abstract

We present a novel task scheduling algorithm for use on mobile robots in real environments. The scheduling problem is formalised as mixed integer program, which is a standard approach in the scheduling community. Our contribution is the use of Allen's interval algebra to prune the search to be performed by the mixed integer program. This significantly speeds up the algorithm. The proposed algorithm has been used on several mobile robots in long-term autonomy scenarios, where it schedules large sets containing a variety of tasks. The proposed algorithm outperforms the state of the art by at least one order of magnitude on both these real tasks and synthetic datasets.