Communication Architecture, Challenges and Paradigms for Robotic Firefighters

Mobile robots can be helpful for post disaster management, e.g., to explore hazardous and damaged environments. How-ever, many challenges in various areas have to be solved, e.g., mechanical issues, situation awareness, communication ca-pabilities. We present the interdisciplinary research project Robotic Firefighters (RFF) which addresses some of the IT problems. We take a detailed look at the proposed dis-tributed communication infrastructure enabling communi-cation between different autonomous mobile RFF units. Be-sides direct multihop communication, the RFF communica-tion architecture includes the ability to have an RFF robot physically distribute communication nodes called Dropboxes. They can be used to deploy a WSN or act as data exchange points enabling communication and coordination between RFF units. Prototype implementations of the RFF Dropbox concept, including two kinds of Dropboxes, and an experi-mental platform for automatic deployment, are introduced