Many domains, such as emergency assistance, agriculture and construction, will increasingly require effective coordination of teams of robots and humans to accomplish a collection of spatially distributed heterogeneous tasks. Some tasks may be independent and others may be related by constraints such as precedence, simultaneity, or proximity.  This talk explores the problem of task allocation, scheduling, and routing  for heterogeneous teams with such cross-schedule dependencies.   It positions this coordination problem in the larger space of multi-robot task allocation problems and describe a taxonomy for this space of problems.  Recognizing that solution quality is important in many domains, we present a centralized mathematical programming approach to computing a bounded-optimal solution to the task allocation, scheduling and routing problem with cross-schedule dependencies.  This "anytime" algorithm computes progressively better solutions and bounds, until it eventually terminates with the optimal solution.  

G. Ayorkor Korsah is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Ashesi University, Ghana and a co-founder of the African Robotics Network (AFRON). She graduated from Dartmouth in 2001, completed an M.E. at the Thayer School in 2003, and in 2011, completed a Ph.D. in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research and professional interests range from designing algorithms for robotics planning and coordination, to exploring the application of technology to challenges faced by developing communities.