A robot-assisted adaptive communication recovery method in disaster scenarios

Abstract Communication recovery is necessary for rescue and reconstruction scenarios including earthquakes, typhoons, floods, etc. The rapid and stable communication link can provide efficient victims’ real-time information for the rescue process. However, traditional centralized communication links cannot traverse the further victims with information-sharing requirements. And the even communication link distribution leads to a load burden on the crowded victim area. Thus, we propose a three-layer architecture consisting of the emergency communication vehicle, backbone links, and branch links to rapidly recover communication via mobile robots. Then, considering victims’ distribution, an improved MaxMin distance algorithm is presented as the basis of robot dispatch. The relay probability of the link is also estimated with closed formulae. Finally, simulation results verify that our proposed algorithm can recover communication with lower delay and higher packet delivery ratio.