Dispatching multiple robots in a urban environment (A)

• Main Author: Chulpaibul, Jiraporn
• Other Authors: Tang Xueyan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/153180
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, robots become essential workers in a range of industries. An individual robot is commonly used to ensure social distancing and detect undesirable social behaviours. However, it is inadequate in monitoring a large area. It is paramount to reduce human contact by efficiently utilising multiple robots for patrolling tasks in urban environment. In this report, we present a multi-robot dispatching strategy for patrolling and a simulator to execute and visualize the strategy on real-world maps. Given a graph of a patrol area and a specified number of robots, it partitions the graph into non-overlapping subgraphs for each robot using K-Means clustering and generates patrolling routes to minimize the distance of the longest route using Greedy algorithm and heuristic rules. In addition, it gracefully handles an accident by assigning the nearest robot to the site and mapping the remaining robots to new clusters while minimizing the shift of clusters using Linear programming.