Cooperative Control of a Multi-Robot Team in a Firefighting Scenario

Using the latest in technology, we wish to assist firefighters, who routinely encounter hazardous situations in their occupation. One plausible way of offering assistance without risking additional human lives is by deploying a robot team, equipped with various sensors, alongside a firefighter. While it is difficult for humans to function well in a smoke filled, high temperature environment, there are sensors available which are designed to operate in such conditions. A robot team can potentially provide a number of services to improve the safety of firefighters, but knowing the firefighter’s location is essential for the team to coordinate these services. In our proposed system, range measurements from sensors mounted on robots will be used for firefighter position estimation. Using only range sensors introduces the challenge that the location of the robot team members with respect to the firefighter will affect the uncertainty of the firefighter’s location. This paper discusses a cooperative control algorithm to minimize the uncertainty in the location the firefighter by actively positioning a robot team with respect to the firefighter’s location. Three results were found using a cooperative control algorithm with a team of four robots. First, it was qualitatively shown that using a sensor with the capability of ranging through walls performed much better than ones that required line of sight (LOS). Secondly, a simple team coordination algorithm does not improve results due to the dynamic nature of the problem. Finally, the ideal distance to position the robots from the firefighter, a parameter in the cooperative control algorithm, is highly environment dependent.