A Framework for Prototyping of Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems for Search, Rescue, and Reconnaissance

Abstract

Robots consistently help humans in dangerous and complex tasks by providing information about, and executing tasks in disaster areas that are highly unstructured, uncertain, possibly hostile, and sometimes not reachable to humans directly. Prototyping autonomous multi-robot systems in disaster scenarios both as hardware platforms and software can provide foundational infrastructure in comparing performance of different methodologies developed for search, rescue, monitoring and reconnaissance. In this chapter, the authors discuss prototyping modules of heterogeneous multi-robot networks and their design characteristics for two different scenarios, namely Search and Rescue in unstructured complex environments, and connectivity maintenance in Sycophant Wireless Sensor Networks which are static ecto-parasitic clandestine sensor networks mounted incognito on mobile agents using only the agent’s mobility without intervention, and are cooperating with sparse mobile robot sensor networks.