Roadmap-Based Level Clearing of Buildings

In this paper we describe a roadmap-based approach for a multi-agent search strategy to clear a building or multi-story environment. This approach utilizes an encoding of the environment in the form of a graph (roadmap) that is used to encode feasible paths through the environment. The roadmap is partitioned into regions, e.g., one per level, and we design region-based search strategies to cover and clear the environment. We can provide certain guarantees within this roadmap-based framework on coverage and the number of agents needed. Our approach can handle complex and realistic environments where many approaches are restricted to simple 2D environments. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.