Chapter 2: Human-Supervisory Distributed Robotic System Architecture

This chapter describes a human-supervisory distributed robotic software architecture, which has been applied in our multi-agent robotic system to automate the daily and repeated sterilization process [Tan et al. (2015a)]. 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 workflow satisfy the overall operation requirements. This layered architecture highlights human factors in the automation workflow to provide a flexible and robust human-knowledge-based supervision and control for safe, reliable, and automated process for healthcare industry.