Robotic wireless network connection of civilians for emergency response operations

Mobile robots equipped with wireless devices can prove very useful during emergency response operations. We envision such robots that locate trapped civilians and initiate an ad hoc network connection between them and the rescuers, so that the latter can better assess the situation and plan the rescue operation accordingly. We present a centralised formulation for the novel problem of optimally allocating robots so that they connect as many civilians as possible, while maintaining their multi-hop connection with a static wireless sink. This formulation stems from a combination of characteristics typically found in assignment and network flow optimisation problems. We have also developed a distributed heuristic with which the robots start from the location of the sink and move autonomously trying to connect the civilians while maintaining connectivity. We evaluate our distributed heuristic using a building evacuation simulator and compare it with the centralised approach.