Safe route guidance of rescue robots and agents based on hazard areas dissemination

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) and robots have been used for many applications such as search and rescue activities. In these activities, the system should quickly and reliably locate victims within the search space and then send promptly a robot or an agent. To ensure the safety of the robot and rescue agent, the WSN should perfectly detects and get-around dangerous areas and then guides robots/ agents through the safest and shortest path. The system that we propose in this paper is a lightweight mechanism for localization and safe route guidance of rescue robots and agents. The guidance system considers the exploitation of information about hazard areas that has been disseminated in the network to find the safest and shortest path. The proposed processes takes into consideration the priority between victims by making the robot / agent choose between different call for rescue. Also, it gives the target the right to choose the most appropriate robot / agent to answer the call of rescue, i.e the communication between robot and sensors makes only the most suitable free robot / agent move to the nearest and urgent target. The navigation process is composed of three phases: Victims and hazards Alert dissemination phase, Rescue Robot answer phase and Robot selection phase.