Enhancing Search and Rescue Capabilities in Hazardous Communication-Denied Environments through Path-Based Sensors with Backtracking

Prior work on path-based sensors has assumed that each agent's path is determined before the agent departs and cannot be changed mid-trip. We consider how an agent might adjust its path in response to new information that it gathers en route. Mid-trip path adjustment is non-trivial because it can increase the number of locations at which a missing agent may have been destroyed (from an external observer's point-of-view). We solve this issue by employing backtracking as a particular form of mid-trip path adjustment that avoids the issue of additional potential destruction locations.