Kilorobot Search and Rescue Using an Immunologically Inspired Approach

This paper presents a new concept and simulated results for cooperatively coordinating autonomous robot teams via the Immunology-derived Distributed Autonomous Robotics Architecture (IDARA) to perform autonomous search and rescue operations. Primarily designed for the coordination and control of large-scale, kilorobot colonies, this architecture uses the unique stochastic learning and response mechanisms of the immune system as a basis to yield a more astute and adaptive response so that actions are varied from being reactionary to deliberative as indicated by environmental conditions and the architecture's perceived capabilities to address them. The IDARA architecture exhibits the guided stochastic search characteristics similar to those found in the human immune system. This characteristic was exploited to develop a series of methods for performing terrain search of dynamic environments. These methods were then evaluated in a variety of domains via computer simulations with robot colonies consisting of up to 1,500 robots. These experiments show that the IDARA architecture and framework provides a simple and robust method that is computationally efficient and does not degrade when coordinating and distributing large colonies of robots in either the terrain exploration and mapping or search and rescue problem domains. By providing new levels of scalability in noisy environments IDARA enables the full potential of micro-scale robotic for intelligent exploration, mapping, and search and rescue operations in a manner not afforded by traditional methods.