Rapid exploration of unknown areas through dynamic deployment of mobile and stationary sensor nodes |
| |
Authors: | Ettore Ferranti Niki Trigoni Mark Levene |
| |
Affiliation: | (1) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK;(2) Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK |
| |
Abstract: | When an emergency occurs within a building, it may be initially safer to send autonomous mobile nodes, instead of human responders,
to explore the area and identify hazards and victims. Exploring all the area in the minimum amount of time and reporting back
interesting findings to the human personnel outside the building is an essential part of rescue operations. Our assumptions
are that the area map is unknown, there is no existing network infrastructure, long-range wireless communication is unreliable
and nodes are not location-aware. We take into account these limitations, and propose an architecture consisting of both mobile
nodes (robots, called agents) and stationary nodes (inexpensive smart devices, called tags). As agents enter the emergency
area, they sprinkle tags within the space to label the environment with states. By reading and updating the state of the local
tags, agents are able to coordinate indirectly with each other, without relying on direct agent-to-agent communication. In
addition, tags wirelessly exchange local information with nearby tags to further assist agents in their exploration task.
Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm, which exploits both tag-to-tag and agent-to-tag communication, outperforms
previous algorithms that rely only on agent-to-tag communication. |
| |
Keywords: | Autonomous agents Area exploration Sensor networks Collaboration Tags |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|