HDec-POSMDPs MRS Exploration and Fire Searching Based on IoT Cloud Robotics

The multi-robot systems (MRS) exploration and fire searching problem is an important application of mobile robots which require massive computation capability that exceeds the ability of traditional MRS′s. This paper propose a cloud-based hybrid decentralized partially observable semi-Markov decision process (HDec-POSMDPs) model. The proposed model is implemented for MRS exploration and fire searching application based on the Internet of things (IoT) cloud robotics framework. In this implementation the heavy and expensive computational tasks are offloaded to the cloud servers. The proposed model achieves a significant improvement in the computation burden of the whole task relative to a traditional MRS. The proposed model is applied to explore and search for fire objects in an unknown environment; using different sets of robots sizes. The preliminary evaluation of this implementation demonstrates that as the parallelism of computational instances increase the delay of new actuation commands which will be decreased, the mean time of task completion is decreased, the number of turns in the path from the start pose cells to the target cells is minimized and the energy consumption for each robot is reduced.