Biomimetic search for urban search and rescue

Abstract

A key objective for a mobile robot in urban search and rescue (USAR) is to efficiently fined survivors, get near enough to communicate and/or drop off communications and biomedical monitoring gear. This paper discusses a biomimetic search strategy extracted from ethological studies of how insects and animals forage for food, and cognitive studies of how children search for objects. This leads to a biomimetic search organization where a robot partitions the search space based on the semantic understanding of the expected distribution of survivors, then systematically searches each of the volumes in ranked order. While in transit between volumes, the robot conducts a passive opportunistic search. The paper also describes how this search strategy is being implemented and evaluated on a mobile robot for two upcoming USAR competitions.