A collective robotic architecture in search and rescue scenarios

Abstract

Multi-robot systems (MRS) may be very useful on assisting humans in many distributed activities, especially for search and rescue (SaR) missions in hazardous scenarios. However, there is a lack of full distributed solutions, addressing the advantages and limitations along different aspects of team operation, like communication requirements or scalability. In this paper, the effects of distributed group configurations are studied and results are drawn from collective exploration and collective inspection tasks in SaR scenarios, with the aim of understanding the main tradeoffs, and distilling design guidelines of collective architectures. With this purpose, extensive simulation experiments of MRS in a SaR scenario were carried out.