First Responders Robotic Network for Disaster Management

Disaster management is one of the fields which more can benefit from robotic systems, hence an increasing effort is nowadays employed in designing heterogeneous teams of robots for these scenarios, including human-robot coordination. Communication is the key factor in any search and rescue mission, both for coordinating operations and for interacting with people in danger. However, catastrophic events frequently cause the failure of telecommunication infrastructure, particularly for large disaster areas. We propose a temporary deployable ad-hoc network, whose nodes are robotic agents, covering a set of critical areas selected in a pre-planning phase, called intervention areas, and a set of physical paths connecting them. We developed a suitable algorithm providing the high level topological structure of the network and a coordination strategy for its construction in a distributed framework. The ensuing system is able to serve as a communication infrastructure, to operate as a wireless sensor network and to be integrated with multiple search and rescue teams.