REACT: Multi Robot Energy-Aware Orchestrator for Indoor Search and Rescue Critical Tasks
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Mar 7, 2025
Abstract
Smart factories enhance production efficiency and sustainability, but
emergencies like human errors, machinery failures and natural disasters pose
significant risks. In critical situations, such as fires or earthquakes,
collaborative robots can assist first-responders by entering damaged buildings
and locating missing persons, mitigating potential losses. Unlike previous
solutions that overlook the critical aspect of energy management, in this paper
we propose REACT, a smart energy-aware orchestrator that optimizes the
exploration phase, ensuring prolonged operational time and effective area
coverage. Our solution leverages a fleet of collaborative robots equipped with
advanced sensors and communication capabilities to explore and navigate unknown
indoor environments, such as smart factories affected by fires or earthquakes,
with high density of obstacles. By leveraging real-time data exchange and
cooperative algorithms, the robots dynamically adjust their paths, minimize
redundant movements and reduce energy consumption. Extensive simulations
confirm that our approach significantly improves the efficiency and reliability
of search and rescue missions in complex indoor environments, improving the
exploration rate by 10% over existing methods and reaching a map coverage of
97% under time critical operations, up to nearly 100% under relaxed time
constraint.
