Connecting trapped civilians to a wireless ad hoc network of emergency response robots
During a disaster, communications are usually impaired. In order for the rescuers and endangered civilians to communicate, we suggest the use of mobile robots that can act as wireless routers. We describe how they can locate trapped civilians and initiate an ad hoc network connection between them and the rescuers, so that the latter can better assess the situation and plan the rescue operation accordingly. The novel problem that arises is the optimal allocation of these robots so that they connect as many civilians as possible, while maintaining their multi-hop connection with a static wireless sink that represents the group of rescuers. We present a centralised formulation, which stems from a combination of characteristics typically found in assignment and network flow optimisation problems. We consider both exact locations for the civilians and uncertain locations with a probabilistic representation. We also present a distributed heuristic with which the robots start from the location of the sink and move autonomously trying to connect the civilians while maintaining connectivity. We evaluate our distributed heuristics in a building evacuation simulator and compare them with the centralised approach.
Georgios Loukas Stelios Timotheou
Intelligent Systems and Networks Group Imperial College London Exhibition Road,SW7 2BT
国际会议
广州
英文
2008-11-19（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）