Scheduling and control of a cloud robot for reception and guidance

This paper presents a design for robot task scheduling and human guidance for health checkup application in a hospital. For a health-checkup robot in a hospital, an IC card reader mounted on the robot is used to retrieve user's personal information from the cloud server. After data retrieval, a visiting list in the hospital is automatically scheduled for each patient. Next, the robot guides each user according to the scheduled list. The scheduling is completed by adopting the non-preemptive Priority Scheduling approach. To assure safe human guidance and navigation, the robot uses data from two laser scanners: one is used for robot localization, and the other is used to detect user's leg for guidance. The robot uses Cartographer for localization and mapping. The guidance controller constantly adjusts motion commands depending on the user's position, meanwhile guides the user to the planned destination. The motion commands are executed by robot motion controller. The proposed design has been successfully verified using a prototype mobile robot in the lab environment.