Evidence map›Paper›PMID 36915326›Full record

ArticleQuantitative imaging in medicine and surgery2023

Multi-robot task assignment for serving people quarantined in multiple hotels during COVID-19 pandemic.

Xiaoshan Bai, Chang Li, Chao Li, Awais Khan, Tianwei Zhang, Bo Zhang

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Quantitative imaging in medicine and surgery, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed.

  1. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

6 authors.

Xiaoshan BaiShenzhen University, College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen, China.
Chang LiShenzhen University, College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen, China.
Chao LiShenzhen University, College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen, China.
Awais KhanShenzhen University, College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen, China.
Tianwei ZhangShenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society (AIRS), Shenzhen, China.
Bo ZhangShenzhen University, College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen, China.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Background: Efficiently combating with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been challenging for medics, police and other service providers. To reduce human interaction, multi-robot systems are promising for performing various missions such as disinfection, monitoring, temperature measurement and delivering goods to people quarantined in prescribed homes and hotels. This paper studies the task assignment problem for multiple dispersed homogeneous robots to visit a set of prescribed hotels to perform tasks such as body temperature assessment or oropharyngeal swabs for people quarantined in the hotels while trying to minimize the robots' total operation time. Each robot can move to multiple hotels sequentially within its limited maximum operation time to provide the service. Methods: The task assignment problem generalizes the multiple traveling salesman problem, which is an NP-hard problem. The main contributions of the paper are twofold: (I) a lower bound on the robots' total operation time to serve all the people has been found based on graph theory, which can be used to approximately evaluate the optimality of an assignment solution; (II) several efficient marginal-cost-based task assignment algorithms are designed to assign the hotel-serving tasks to the robots. Results: In the Monte Carlo simulations where different numbers of robots need to serve the people quarantined in 30 and 90 hotels, the designed task assignment algorithms can quickly (around 30 ms) calculate near-optimal assignment solutions (within 1.15 times of the optimal value). Conclusions: Numerical simulations show that the algorithms can lead to solutions that are close to the optimal compared with the competitive genetic algorithm and greedy algorithm.

Indexed as

coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)lower boundmarginal costMulti-robot systemstask assignment

Identifiers

PMID36915326
PMCPMC10006103

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.