Autonomous Evacuation Boat in Dynamic Flood Disaster Environment

Abstract

The evacuation process in a flood disaster environment faces some challenges when exploring the affected area. During a flood situation, the boat must quickly determine the shortest path to save as many flood victims as possible. In this research, we proposed an adaptively rotatable distance sensor implemented in an evacuation boat. The single sensor conducts either early rotation (with a specific initial rotation angle) for early detection of the obstacles or wider rotation to determine the way-out point using the greedy principle. The proposed methodology is implemented in three-dimensional simulation, containing static and dynamic for both water wave environment and obstacles. The obstacles are limited to some exact cube shape with an exact size, and they are linearly moving for the dynamic ones. By adapting the greedy principle, the boat agent can successfully move on the water surface to avoid static and dynamic obstacles. This achievement cannot be reached by the previous path planning method.