Path Planning of a Firefighting Robot Prototype Using GPS Navigation

Abstract

As a high-risk occupation, firefighters are exposed to huge challenges and dangers in extinguishing fires and performing rescue operations. Therefore, many firefighter robots are being designed and deployed to firefighting operations and promote the efficiency while protecting the human operators. There are already studies on the implementation of mobile fire-fighting robots, but how to plan an efficient route in the case of multiple fire spots still needs further research. In this work, we propose a greedy-algorithm-based route planner and calculate the best route to visit each fire spot with the shortest time, by formulating the problem as a traveling salesman problem (TSP). We validate the proposed idea by using a mobile robot, namely redbot, and present the test results.