Cooperative search and rescue with a team of mobile robots

We present an implemented algorithm f o r a distributed team of autonomous mobile robots to search for an ob-ject. When one robot finds i t, they all gather around it, and then manipulate (“rescue”) i t. The algorithm exploits parallelism, with all robots searching concur-rently, and also teamwork, because the manipulation is performed cooperatively. Our algorithm is fully dis-tributed; the robots communicate with each other, and there is no central server or supervisor. Applications include hazardous waste cleanup, bomb detection and removal, materials delivery, and eventually the rescue of survivors of accidents or disasters. The search and rescue program was written using MOVER, a programming system for distributed tasks. MOVER is quite general, allowing arbitrary synchro-nization of tasks among workstations and robots. The system provides high-level programming constructs for task distribution across robots. Finally, MOVER en-courages code re-use because the task distribution mechanism can synchronize any set of procedures (without rewriting), allowing the programmer of a dis-tributed task to access libraries of robot software Writ-ten for single-robot tasks