Online planning for collaborative search and rescue by heterogeneous robot teams

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 a search and rescue setting, where robots with different capabilities work together to accomplish tasks (rescue) and find information about further tasks (search) at the same time. The state of the art for such collaboration is robot control based on independent planning for robots with different capabilities and typically incorporates uncertainty with only a limited scope. In contrast, in this paper, we create a joint plan to optimise all robots’ actions incorporating uncertainty about the future information gain of the robots. We evaluate our planner’s performance in settings based on real disasters and find that our approach decreases the response time by 20-25% compared to state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, practical constraints are met in terms of time and resource utilisation