Institute of Fundamental Technological Research

The paper reports initial results on modeling and simulating cooperation of rescue robots. Our aim is to investigate the efficiency of the “first simulate then act” paradigm for rescue operations undertaken by multiple mobile robots, assuming that information about the environment can be incomplete and partially inconsistent. To deal with ignorance and contradictions we adopt a non–standard logic in the inference engine. To demonstrate feasibility of our approach we present the architecture of the developed simulator and results of experiments done so far.

four-valued logic, search and rescue, multirobotic systems

The aim of this paper is to present application of non-standard logic in the process of reasoning regarding the state of environment in a multi-robotic system. We have investigated the possibility that the usage of four-valued logic can serve as an alternative to the traditional probabilistic approach when handling the uncertainties. As a proof of concept, we have considered a typical search-and-rescue scenario in which a group of n robots performs a search for k victims localized in random positions in an initially unknown building. The building is represented in the form of a graph while the uncertainties are modeled by parameters denoting probabilities of victim observation and random blocking of a robot transition between neighboring nodes (which precludes the possibility for the robot to know anything about the actual graph structure with full confidence). The simulation results show that the unique features of applied reasoning language give significant improvement over typical approaches based on the two-valued logic. The results have a preliminary character, in the sense that up to now, only numerical experiments have been performed—applying the idea in a real multi-robotic system is currently underway.

Search-and-rescue problem, Reasoning engine, Four-valued logic, 4QL, Simulation