A Maintenance-Aware Approach for Sustainable Autonomous Mobile Robot Fleet Management

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are capable of carrying out operations continuously for 24/7, which enables them to optimize tasks, increase throughput, and meet demanding operational requirements. To ensure seamless and uninterrupted operations, an effective coordination of task allocation and charging schedules is crucial while considering the preservation of battery sustainability. Moreover, regular preventive maintenance plays an important role in enhancing the robustness of AMRs against hardware failures and abnormalities during task execution. However, existing works do not consider the influence of properly scheduling AMR maintenance on both task downtime and battery lifespan. In this paper, we propose ${\sf MTC}$, a maintenance-aware task and charging scheduler designed for fleets of AMR operating continuously in highly automated environments. ${\sf MTC}$ leverages Linear Programming (LP) to first help decide the best time to schedule maintenance for a given set of AMRs. Subsequently, the Kuhn-Munkres algorithm, a variant of the Hungarian algorithm, is used to finalize task assignments and carry out the charge scheduling to minimize the combined cost of task downtime and battery degradation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ${\sf MTC}$, reducing the combined total cost up to 3.45 times and providing up to 68% improvement in battery capacity degradation compared to the baselines.