Exploration with Heterogeneous Robots Networks for Search and Rescue

摘要

This work is the first part of a project that is intended to develop a control strategy for multiple heterogeneous robots oriented to the assistance in situations of search and rescue. The project is presented from two perspectives that run simultaneously but in different time scales, the first is the real time heterogeneous robots control perspective in charge of the robots task execution studied mainly through the perspective of artificial potential functions and the second the task allocation problem in charge of the optimization of the number of people helped. This paper is intended to present the advance of the project in the area of real time control focused in the task of exploration considering the heterogeneity of the velocity of the robots, its limitations in communication range and the obstacles evasion. The algorithm presented allows the robots to explore a non-convex scene without losing the network connectivity, without presenting collisions between robots or between obstacles and introducing a simple network reconfiguration algorithm intended to make more flexible the network structure.