A Cyber-Physical System for Public Environment Perception and Emergency Handling

Cyber-physical system (CPS) is a multi-dimensional complex system in which physical world operations are monitored and controlled using the communication and computing components, and they interact with each other in order to achieve a global optimization of such system operation. Dynamic response to the emergencies in a public environment not only requires the perception capability that obtains such useful information, but also needs the optimum operation methods to handling them. With the tight integration of communication, computing and control, a CPS can be used to address the aforementioned goals. In this paper, a framework of the CPS for public environment perception and emergency handling is developed, and its requirements to each component in the framework are analyzed in detail. Furthermore, a task allocation mechanism and a hybrid path planning approach are also presented for a set of robots in the CPS to handle uncertain emergencies collaboratively. Finally, we demonstrate the system using a case study in which mobile robots are equipped with multiple sensors to handle fires with different cases in a scenario of public environment, and the simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and the feasibility of such system.