Challenges of the Multi-robot Team in the GUARDIANS Project

The Guardians multi-robot team is being designed to be deployed in a large warehouse to assist firefighters in the event or danger of a fire. The large size of the environment together with development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges in search and rescue operations. The GUARDIANS robots act alongside a firefighter and should provide, among others, the following tasks: to guide or accompany the firefighters on the site while indicating possible obstacles and locations of danger and maintaining communications links. In order to fulfill the aforementioned tasks the robots need to be able to exert certain behaviours. Among the basic behaviours are capabilities to unite in a group - generate a formation - and navigate on the site while keeping this formation. The basic control model used to generate these behaviours is based on the so-called social potential field framework, which we adapt to fulfill specific tasks of the Guardians scenario. All of the tasks can be achieved without central control, and some of the tasks can be performed even without explicit communication among the robots. We discuss advantages and shortcomings of our model and present samples of implementation on ERA-MOBI robots, commonly referred to as Erratics.