Collaborative movement of rescue robots for reliable and effective networking in disaster area

We investigated a collaboration scheme for rescue robots for reliable and effective operation of rescue systems using robots. The investigation focused on the collaborative movement of robots to maintain their wireless network. We propose classifying the robots into search robots and relay robots and using a behavior algorithm for their collaborative movement. According to the algorithm, search robots explore the disaster area and search for victims, whereas relay robots act as relay terminals within the network. Each robot classifies itself autonomously and repeatedly as the system operation progresses. We evaluated the performance of the victim detection system (a rescue system introduced in our previous paper) based on the proposed scheme by computer simulation. Its performance was improved compared with the case where every robot walked randomly in the disaster area and no classification occurred