An initial evaluation of approaches to building entry for large robot teams

Teams of robots for search and rescue in dangerous building environments are emerging as a potential approach to reducing risk to rescuers and improving rescue rate. However, one aspect of the use of such teams that is often overlooked is the initial entry of the robots into the building. If many robots enter the building from the same entrance, it will often be the case that the robots interfere with each other and dramatically slow down the initial phase of the exploration. In this paper, we evaluate several different approaches to over-coming this initial congestion and identify heuristics that allow the robots to most quickly clear the entry area and begin their actual mission. Our results showed that unless the exits to the initial entry area are very small, the most effective technique is for every robot to simply move in the direction of the most open space.