Scheduling to Minimize Downtime in Human-Multirobot Supervisory Control

Abstract

This paper proposes the use of on-line scheduling in human telesupervision of robot teams to determine and maximize the number of robots a human operator can manage at once. To maximize the number of robots in a team, the double-Shifted Shortest Processing Time (dSSPT) algorithm was proposed for this purpose. This scheduling algorithm has the objective of minimizing total downtime (or flow time) for the group. Simulated experimental results show that dSSPT: 1) reduces downtime with respect to existing scheduling algorithms; and 2) increases the achievable span-of-control (i.e., the number of robots supervised) in a human-multirobot team compared to an existing method of prediction [3], especially as the variation in task lengths increases.