Joint location and configuration of mobile service robots for hospitals

This paper addresses the problem of the joint location and configuration of mobile service robots in hospitals. The robotic system consists of a set of identical base robots that can be configured with different functional modules. The robotic system is designed to perform a set of nursing and logistic activities, each requiring a robot with specific modules. The problem consists of determining the configuration of each base robot and assigning each robot to some given home stations. In this paper, we propose a linear programming model for the joint location and configuration problem. A column generation approach is proposed to provide a tight lower bound and a good feasible solution. The preliminary experiment results are encouraging.