A framework for area coverage and the visual search for victims in USAR with a mobile robot

Mobile robots can serve to augment the capabilities of rescuers for urban search and rescue (USAR) situations but must be supervised by humans. As such, the envisioned application for this research is to deploy a human-supervised mobile robot to perform the search aspect of a USAR mission. This paper presents a framework developed to imbue a mobile robot with the intelligence to perform the search task under the guidance of a human supervisor. The framework enables the robot to perform area coverage as well as to search of victims visually using computer vision. Preliminary experiments to test the framework are also described. We find that the framework is suitable for implementation on a mobile robot for its envisioned purpose.