Advantages of Heterogeneous Agent Populations for Exploration and Pathfinding in Unknown Terrain
Florian Blatt, Matthias Becker, Helena Szczerbicka · Frontiers in sensors · 2015
In this work we demonstrate how the deployment of several types of agents increases the efficiency and the overall success concerning the task to explore unknown terrain, and finding a pathbetween a starting point and various points of interest. The used agents have different capabilities that are typically foundin technical assistance systems used in search and rescueoperations. In our test cases, the environments to be explored have both, regular characteristics like a maze or a building as well as irregular structures.Our simulations using heterogeneous and cooperating agent populationsshow, that this approach is superior to homogeneous populations, with a higher rate of finding the destinations and in shorter time. The results should be applicable for strategies in emergency incidents, and search and rescue operations, such as the robot-aided search for victims after an earthquake or other disasters, where formerly known terrain would be inaccessible forhuman rescue helpers.