HybridExploration: A distributed approach to terrain exploration using mobile and fixed sensor nodes

— When an emergency occurs within a building, it may be initially safer to send autonomous mobile nodes, instead of human responders, to explore the area and identify hazards and victims. Exploring all the area in the minimum amount of time and reporting back interesting findings to the human personnel outside the building is an essential part of rescue operations. Our assumptions are that the area map is unknown, there is no existing network infrastructure, longrange wireless communication is unreliable and nodes are not location-aware. We take into account these limitations, and propose a novel algorithm, HybridExploration, that makes use of both mobile nodes (robots, called agents) and stationary nodes (inexpensive smart devices, called tags). As agents enter the emergency area, they sprinkle tags within the space to label the environment with states. By reading and updating the state of the local tags, agents are able to coordinate indirectly with each other, without relying on ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Ettore Ferranti, Niki Trigoni, Mark Levene
• Keywords: Autonomous Mobile Nodes, IROS 2008, Longrange Wireless Communication, Mobile Nodes, Robotics