Scheduling of a Robot’s Tasks With the TaskER Framework

Robots, in contrast to typical computational systems, affect the physical environment directly. Therefore, other assumptions must be considered for task management procedures in these system types. Robots coexist with humans in the environment and act upon potentially dangerous objects (e.g., a cooker); hence, extra safety procedures in robot task harmonisation must be ensured. Additionally, an algorithm that schedules tasks for a robot and optimises the robot's operation needs to consider the robot motion time, dynamics of the physical processes, changes in the robot user preferences and changes in the environment made by other habitants. In this article, we investigate the problem of switching between various independent tasks safely and state requirements for a control system resolving it. The tasks are uploaded to a store, launched on a robot at the user's request (similar to smartphone applications) and scheduled following a configurable algorithm. Furthermore, we design a model of systems satisfying the requirements. The systems are structured with agents of different classes. We propose a task-switching procedure and dedicated states of the finite-state machines describing the operation of the agents. Finally, we present a TaskER framework implementing the model, and we verify the model through the execution of an exemplary system in scenarios showing the benefits of the model implementation. As a result of our approach application, the robot tasks can be safely interrupted, postponed, resumed, and potential danger (e.g., leaving a cooker on for a long time) can be minimised.