REACT: Multi Robot Energy-Aware Orchestrator for Indoor Search and Rescue Critical Tasks

Smart factories enhance production efficiency and sustainability, but emergencies like human errors, machinery failures and natural disasters pose significant risks. In critical situations, such as fires or earthquakes, collaborative robots can assist first-responders by entering damaged buildings and locating missing persons, mitigating potential losses. Unlike previous solutions that overlook the critical aspect of energy management, in this paper we propose REACT, a smart energy-aware orchestrator that optimizes the exploration phase, ensuring prolonged operational time and effective area coverage. Our solution leverages a fleet of collaborative robots equipped with advanced sensors and communication capabilities to explore and navigate unknown indoor environments, such as smart factories affected by fires or earthquakes, with high density of obstacles. By leveraging real-time data exchange and cooperative algorithms, the robots dynamically adjust their paths, minimize redundant movements and reduce energy consumption. Extensive simulations confirm that our approach significantly improves the efficiency and reliability of search and rescue missions in complex indoor environments, improving the exploration rate by 10% over existing methods and reaching a map coverage of 97% under time critical operations, up to nearly 100% under relaxed time constraint.