Seamless Routing and Cooperative Localization of Multiple Mobile Robots for Search and Rescue Application
Chang-Eun Lee, Hyun-Ja Im, Jeong-Min Lim, Young-Jo Cho, Tae‐Kyung Sung · ETRI Journal · 2015
In particular, for a practical mobile robot team to perform such a task as that of carrying out a search and rescue mission in a disaster area, the network connectivity and localization have to be guaranteed even in an environment where the network infrastructure is destroyed or a Global Positioning System is unavailable. This paper proposes the new collective intelligence network management architecture of multiple mobile robots supporting seamless network connectivity and cooperative localization. The proposed architecture includes a resource manager that makes the robots move around and not disconnect from the network link by considering the strength of the network signal and link quality. The location manager in the architecture supports localizing robots seamlessly by finding the relative locations of the robots as they move from a global outdoor environment to a local indoor position. The proposed schemes assuring network connectivity and localization were validated through numerical simulations and applied to a search and rescue robot team.