Editorial: Special Issue on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), Part 1

On land, on water, and in the air, disaster response is always a race against time in order to reach out to as many survivors as possible. Rescue robotics is an emerging technology that can be of great use for accelerating this search, and thus for saving human lives. While there has been a notable increase in the deployment of rescue robots for local incidents and disasters, there remain core problems that need to be solved until this emerging technology is ready to be widely adopted. This part deals with core problems of mobility, communication, and structure recognition on unmanned vehicles operating on rough terrain, under the sea, and in the air. This is the third special issue on SSRR published by the Journal of Field Robotics. Our previous issue in March-May 2011 focused on the overall design as well as crucial components for advanced locomotion, and our previous issue in January-February 2008 focused on lessons learned from field trials in the search and rescue domain. Several natural disasters that occurred in the past were in connection with the flooding of larger areas. In such situations, unmanned underwater and surface vehicles can be of great use for disaster mitigation. The paper by Ozog et al. presents an approach to long-term multi-session mapping on underwater vehicles with a focus on ship hull inspection tasks. The proposed method uses a combination of visual features and locally planar surface patches