Swarm Control with Particle Filter for Search and Rescue Operations Using Mobile Robots

During search and rescue operations carried out for emergency response or disaster relief, there are many targets requiring rescue operations in a given environment, whose number and locations are unknown. In this paper, we investigate how to control the mobility of swarm of autonomous robots to efficiently search for and approach to targets to execute given tasks. We propose a swarm control algorithm, which includes the search and approach operations based on swarm intelligence, called mobile sensing cluster (MSC), combined with target localization employing particle filter (PF). We design mobility control that takes full advantage of the integrated operations of MSC and localization using PF. With computer simulations, we show that the proposed swarm control reduces the time required for searching targets and for completing their required tasks in comparison to reference schemes.