Robot Swarm Navigation and Victim Detection Using Rendezvous Consensus in Search and Rescue Operations

Cooperative behaviors in multi-robot systems emerge as an excellent alternative for collaboration in search and rescue tasks to accelerate the finding survivors process and avoid risking additional lives. Although there are still several challenges to be solved, such as communication between agents, power autonomy, navigation strategies, and detection and classification of survivors, among others. The research work presented by this paper focuses on the navigation of the robot swarm and the consensus of the agents applied to the victims detection. The navigation strategy is based on the application of particle swarm theory, where the robots are the agents of the swarm. The attraction and repulsion forces that are typical in swarm particle systems are used by the multi-robot system to avoid obstacles, keep group compact and navigate to a target location. The victims are detected by each agent separately, however, once the agents agree on the existence of a possible victim, these agents separate from the general swarm by creating a sub-swarm. The sub-swarm agents use a modified rendezvous consensus algorithm to perform a formation control around the possible victims and then carry out a consensus of the information acquired by the sensors with the aim to determine the victim existence. Several experiments were conducted to test navigation, obstacle avoidance, and search for victims. Additionally, different situations were simulated with the consensus algorithm. The results show how swarm theory allows the multi-robot system navigates avoiding obstacles, finding possible victims, and settling down their possible use in search and rescue operations.