Human-Supervisory Distributed Robotic System Architecture for Healthcare Operation Automation

This paper proposes a human-supervisory distributed robotic software architecture, which has been applied in a multi-agent robotic system to automate the daily and repeated sterilization process at hospitals of US Department of Veteran Affairs. Each robot is considered as an independent agent to perform assigned tasks with its own capability and coordinate their operations with other robots to ensure that the main process of the work flow to satisfy the overall operation requirements. This layered architecture highlights human factors in the automation work flow to provide a flexible and robust human-knowledge-based supervision and control for safe, reliable, and automated process for healthcare industry. The proposed architecture and the implemented system were tested in a practical project to validate its effectiveness and robustness.