Urban Search and Rescue with Anti-pheromone Robot Swarm architecture

Abstract

In case of a natural disaster, the use of human-robot cooperation is a great option, for this reason the research area Robotic Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) is very promising. This paper proposes a new distributed architecture based on a swarm of robots that allows to solve this problem in an efficient way. For this, it is proposed the fusion of 3 different technologies: hector SLAM, anti-pheromone exploration and computer vision. The use of Nvidia's jetbot robot with a LIDAR sensor is proposed and we use ROS as development platform. The architecture has been tested in two different scenarios in the NetLogo simulation environment. This solution seems promising, bringing new advantages with respect to the state of the art, due to the fact that the time to find a potential victim is shorter with the increasing number of robots in the swarm.