Fast and Parallel Wireless Communication Backbone Deployment with Networked Robots Disaster robotics have gained considerable attention in the last decade while providing support for the emergency teams in search and rescue operations. Here, we propose a system to support first responders, such as firefighters and police officers, by establishing a communication network connecting multiple clients. The clients are the access points for the rescue teams. The objective is to deploy robots equipped with communication devices in such a manner that the clients are able to communicate among themselves. We focus on minimizing the deployment time. Our approach allows to combine links when computing the backbone. Then, our proposed method decomposes the problem into a set of local communication networks that when solved connects all clients in a network. Unlike previous works, the deployment is done in parallel, which decreases the time to set up the network. Our method uses realistic communication metrics to determine the connectivity between devices and to deploy the robots in the environment. We show using both simulations and physical experiments the feasibility of our solution.

RDSP: Rapidly Deployable Wireless Ad Hoc System for PostDisaster Management In postdisaster scenarios, such as after floods, earthquakes, and in war zones, the cellular communication infrastructure may be destroyed or seriously disrupted. In such emergency scenarios, it becomes very important for first aid responders to communicate with other rescue teams in order to provide feedback to both the central office and the disaster survivors. To address this issue, rapidly deployable systems are required to reestablish connectivity and assist users and first responders in the region of incident. In this work, we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a rapidly deployable system for first response applications in postdisaster situations, named RDSP. The proposed system helps early rescue responders and victims by sharing their location information to remotely located servers by utilizing a novel routing scheme. This novel routing scheme consists of the Dynamic ID Assignment (DIA) algorithm and the Minimum Maximum Neighbor (MMN) algorithm. The DIA algorithm is used by relay devices to dynamically select their IDs on the basis of all the available IDs of networks. Whereas, the MMN algorithm is used by the client and relay devices to dynamically select their next neighbor relays for the transmission of messages. The RDSP contains three devices; the client device sends the victimxe2x80x99s location information to the server, the relay device relays information between client and server device, the server device receives messages from the client device to alert the rescue team. We deployed and evaluated our system in the outdoor environment of the university campus. The experimental results show that the RDSP system reduces the message delivery delay and improves the message delivery ratio with lower communication overhead.