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DESIGN OF A ROBOT TEAM FOR SEARCH IN CENTRAL
EUROPEAN FORESTS
Santi Esteva, Antoni Martorano
Institut d’Inform`atica i Aplicacions, Girona University, C/ Santal´o S/N, Girona, Spain
Albert Figueras
Institut d’Inform`atica i Aplicacions, Girona University, C/ Santal´o S/N, Girona, Spain
Keywords:
Autonomous robots, Surveillance, Robot exploration, Robot team design.
Abstract:
Security incidents are a new topic for the autonomous robot task. Robots, sensors and intelligence make a
great combination to achieve specific goals in this area. This paper proposes a methodology to design the size
and the exploration form for a group of robots in the typical Central European forest. The objective is to find
victims hidden into the fallen leaves. A statistics of the trouble situations is the starting point to design the
team to displace at the objective. The robots are autonomous but is necessary one human supervisor to solve
some critical situations. The results show the partition and the area covered by a simple group of equal robots.
1 INTRODUCTION
In the last years, security incidents, like terrorism,
have raised new research areas focused in surveil-
lance issues, the automation of these tasks is an im-
portant research area using robotic platforms and sen-
sors. The use of a team of robots and sensors is an
approach that has many advantages and difficulties
over a single robot platform. In this paper it is pro-
posed a framework to develop a multi-robot surveil-
lance platform (Caballero D., 2010), (Caballero D.,
2009). Surveillance is the act to close watch kept over
someone. Robotic surveillance is the topic to refer at
close watch on the relevant events. The automation
of the surveillance task are the approaches oriented
to the formalization of the problem (Everett H. R.,
1999), (Everett H. R., 2003).
Related works to segment the space to explore for
a multi-robot teams, several authors uses Voronoi di-
agrams of the space exploration to assign rectangu-
lar polygons strategies to segment the space explo-
ration (Matcovschi M. H., 2008). Other works uses
the agent entities and discuss the ability of the agent
to explore determined area (Rybski P. E., 2000). And
other determine an algorithm to achieve optimized re-
gion partition and coverage according the energy and
some constraints (Hao Wu, 2008).
This work analyzes the optimum partition of the
space exploration according probabilistic information
of the abnormal situations for the robot, which is nec-
essary a human operator support. Optimizing the effi-
ciency of the whole team, robots and support and also
taking information from the biological communities
(Martorano, 2010) is the objective of the presented
work.
2 THE TERMITES
The Termites colonies are groups of social insects
composed by a social organization to share tasks in a
specialized form. The Workers, the Soldiers and Re-
productives elements are a self-organized system in a
decentralized form for a common collective behavior.
The Caste system of the Termite cologne depends
on the environmental scenarios and depredators, from
a 2% of soldiers in Africa zones to 12% of soldiers in
a Formosa Island.
Genetic information characterizes the Caste, size
and composition. Also stress situations can adapt the
system to the new changes, as temperature, depreda-
tors, etc. The biological process into the live of the
Termite insect evolves the colonies adapting at the
evolution phase of the group. The differences of the
Caste proportion are justified to improve the colony
survival at different conditions; the analysis of this in-
325
Esteva S., Martorano A. and Figueras A..
DESIGN OF A ROBOT TEAM FOR SEARCH IN CENTRAL EUROPEAN FORESTS.
DOI: 10.5220/0003570603250328
In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO-2011), pages 325-328
ISBN: 978-989-8425-75-1
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)