Directional audio beacon deployment: an assistive multi-robot application

This paper addresses the problem of directional audio beacon deployment. We describe how these beacons can be used on mobile robots to produce a system that can self-deploy and aid in disaster recovery efforts. A distributed algorithm that uses explicit communication to coordinate the deployment process is presented. The algorithm employs existing multi-robot task allocation methodologies and a procedure for clustering potential deployment locations in a problem domain-specific manner. Results from a sensor-based multi-robot simulation demonstrate that self-deploying beacons are indeed feasible and have the potential to decrease expected egress time. Furthermore, we show that the implementation is free of simulator-specific anomalies through trials with a group of physical robots.