Popis: |
Many interesting and difficult practical problems need to be tackled in the areas of firefighting, biological and/or chemical decontamination, tactical and/or rescue searches, and Web spamming, among others. These problems, however, can be mapped onto the graph decontamination problem, also called the graph search problem. Once the target space is mapped onto a graph G(N,E), where N is the set of G nodes and E the set of G edges, one initially considers all nodes in N to be contaminated. When a guard, i.e., a decontaminating agent, is placed in a node i ? N, i becomes (clean and) guarded. In case such a guard leaves node i, it can only be guaranteed that i will remain clean if all its neighboring nodes are either clean or clean and guarded. The graph decontamination/search problem consists of determining a sequence of guard movements, requiring the minimum number of guards needed for the decontamination of G. This chapter presents a novel swarm robotics approach to firefighting, a conflagration in a hypothetical apartment ground floor. The mechanism has been successfully simulated on the Webots platform, depicting a firefighting swarm of e-puck robots. |