An innovative approach for ad hoc network establishment in disaster environments by the deployment of wireless mobile agents

In disasters, many stationary tasks, such as saving survivors in debris, extinguishing fire of buildings, and so on, need first responders to complete on site. In such circumstances, wireless mobile robots are usually employed to search for tasks and establish ad hoc networks to assist first responders. Due to the unknown and complexity of environments and limited capabilities of wireless mobile robots, searching and establishing ad hoc networks in disaster environments is a challenging issue in both theory and practice. To this end, a task-based wireless mobile robot deployment approach is proposed in this article. The proposed approach consists of a search process and a deployment process. The search process can guide wireless mobile robots to efficiently find tasks in unknown and complex environments. The deployment process can find suitable deployment locations for wireless mobile robots to establish ad hoc networks. The established ad hoc networks can ensure the communication of wireless mobile robots in the network and can cover the maximum number of task locations and the maximum areas in a disaster environment. Experimental results demonstrate that based on the proposed approach, wireless mobile robots have better performance in terms of search and ad hoc network establishment in disaster environments.