A real-time rescue system: Towards practical implementation of robotic sensor network

A real-time monitor and rescue system must be able to both quickly and reliably detect the event happening in its monitoring region. Furthermore, it is required to fulfill certain rescue mission, e.g., navigate victims to exit through safe path in case of emergency. Current monitor and rescue approaches generally rely on either teleoperated robots, or teams of wireless robots. Typically the robots used in these systems tend to have high cost which make them unpractical in large scale deployment and applications. In this work, we present a realtime monitor and rescue system, TelosW-Bot Net, utilizing integrated networks. The integrated network is an integration of stationary sensor networks and robots: static sensor networks comprised of large numbers of small, simple, and inexpensive wireless sensors, and the robots which can communicate and controlled by sensor nodes. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system in real test bed composed of 46 sensors, which is one of the largest robotic sensor network to our knowledge, providing empirical results.