Planning search and rescue missions for UAV teams

The coordination of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to carry out aerial surveys is a major challenge for emergency responders. In particular, UAVs have to fly over kilometre-scale areas while trying to discover casualties as quickly as possible. To aid in this process, it is desirable to exploit the increasing availability of data about a disaster from sources such as crowd reports, satellite re- mote sensing, or manned reconnaissance. In particular, such inform- ation can be a valuable resource to drive the planning of UAV flight paths over a space in order to discover people who are in danger. However challenges of computational tractability remain when plan- ning over the very large action spaces that result. To overcome these, we introduce the survivor discovery problem and present as our solu- tion, the first example of a continuous factored coordinated Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. Our evaluation against state of the art benchmarks show that our algorithm, Co-CMCTS, is able to localise more casualties faster than standard approaches by 7% or more on simulations with real-world data

Online planning for collaborative search and rescue by heterogeneous robot teams

Collaboration is essential for effective performance by groups of robots in disaster response settings. Here we are particularly interested in heterogeneous robots that collaborate in complex scenarios with incomplete, dynamically changing information. In detail, we consider a search and rescue setting, where robots with different capabilities work together to accomplish tasks (rescue) and find information about further tasks (search) at the same time. The state of the art for such collaboration is robot control based on independent planning for robots with different capabilities and typically incorporates uncertainty with only a limited scope. In contrast, in this paper, we create a joint plan to optimise all robots' actions incorporating uncertainty about the future information gain of the robots. We evaluate our planner's performance in settings based on real disasters and find that our approach decreases the response time by 20-25% compared to state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, practical constraints are met in terms of time and resource utilisation