Simulation-based risk assessment of robot fleets in flooded environments

Abstract

Unmanned autonomous systems offer safety benefits for potentially hazardous environments. The evaluation of the performance of such systems is challenging because hazardous environments, i.e. due to flood or fire, are constantly changing. In this paper we introduce a system for simulation-based risk assessment of a fleet of autonomous machines performing a rescue mission. The simulation is based on combining the dynamic propagation of the hazard and the real-time simulation of the fleet. Our use case analyses an underground rescue mission under a pipeline breakage. The propagation of the flood is simulated together with the actions of robots. We evaluate the system by simulating several scenarios and measuring the mission success for each. As a result we show that a simulation based risk assessment is a feasible option for evaluating the performance of complex distributed systems.