Journal article icon

Journal article

Collaborative online planning for automated victim search in disaster response

Abstract:
Collaboration is essential for effective performance by groups of robots in disaster response settings. Here we are particularly interested in heterogeneous robots that collaborate in complex scenarios with incomplete, dynamically changing information. In detail, we consider an automated victim search setting, where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with different capabilities work together to scan for mobile phones and find and provide information about possible victims near these phone locations. The state of the art for such collaboration is robot control based on independent planning for robots with different tasks and typically incorporates uncertainty with only a limited scope. In contrast, in this paper, we take into account complex relations between robots with different tasks. As a result, we create a joint, full-horizon plan for the whole robot team by optimising over the uncertainty of future information gain using an online planner with hindsight optimisation. This joint plan is also used for further optimisation of individual UAV paths based on the long-term plans of all robots. We evaluate our planner’s performance in a realistic simulation environment based on a real disaster and find that our approach finds victims 25% faster compared to current state-of-the-art approaches.
Publication status:
Published
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

Actions


Access Document


Publisher copy:
10.1016/j.robot.2017.09.014

Authors


More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Computer Science
Oxford college:
St Anne's College
Role:
Author
Publisher:
Elsevier
Journal:
Robotics and Autonomous Systems More from this journal
Volume:
100
Pages:
251-266
Publication date:
2017-11-04
Acceptance date:
2017-09-21
DOI:
ISSN:
0921-8890
Keywords:
Pubs id:
pubs:815362
UUID:
uuid:491f9481-02fb-4a28-9f30-0f97775771e3
Local pid:
pubs:815362
Source identifiers:
815362
Deposit date:
2018-01-06

Terms of use


Views and Downloads






If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record

TO TOP