Guardians Robot Swarm Exploration and Firefighter Assistance

The GUARDIANS robot swarm is designed to be deployed in a large warehouse in the event of a fire to assist fire fighters. The large size of the environment together with development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility,represent major challenges in search and rescue operations. We discuss a swarm of robots assisting a fire fighter. We explain the swarming algorithms which make the robots follow a human while no communication is required. Next we discuss our method for cooperative localization system which uses wireless network as a tool. We also discuss the interface between a human and the robot swarm. The swarming algorithms implement the functionality by which the robots react to the human. The robot swarm can provide guidance information. Together with the fire fighters we explored how to understand and benefit from a robot swarm. Finally the paper presents experimental results of our sensor based exploration method.