Entanglement detection of a swarm of tethered robots in search and rescue applications

In urban search and rescue (USAR) applications, robots play a pivotal role. As USAR is time sensitive, swarm of robots is preferred over single robot for victim search. Tethered robots are widely used in USAR applications because tether provides robust data communication and power supply. The problem with using tethers in a collapsed, unstructured environment is tether entanglement. Entanglement detection becomes vital in this scenario. This paper presents a novel, low-cost approach to detect entanglement in the tether connecting two mobile robots. The proposed approach requires neither localization nor an environment map. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective in identifying tether entanglement.