Robot-Sensor Networks for Search and Rescue

In order to fulfill its mission, a search and rescue system must be able to both quickly and reliably locate victims within the search space. Current search and rescue approaches generally rely on either teleoperated robots, or teams of wireless robots. Since typically the robots used in these systems employ sophisticated hardware components and are few in number, system cost tends to be high and the loss or destruction of even a single robot may seriously compromise mission integrity. We present an alternate approach utilizing robot-sensor networks — ad-hoc wireless networks comprised of large numbers of small, simple, and inexpensive wireless sensors and robots. Limiting the use of sophisticated, expensive hardware for rescue system components may be more than compensated for in both cost and performance by the advantages of density and redundancy that smaller, simpler, less costly sensors and robots can provide. In this paper we describe a robot-sensor network for target tracking without reliance on localization services such as GPS or magnetic compass, focusing on simple algorithms for distributed decisionmaking and information propagation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system in simulation, providing empirical results and discussion of future work.