A Rescue Robot Control Architecture Ensuring Safe Semi-autonomous Operation

The rescue robots developed at the International University Bremen (IUB) are semi-autonomous mobile robots providing streams of video and other essential data via wireless connections to human operated basestations, supplemented by various basic and optional behaviors on board of the robots. Due to the limitations of wireless connections and the complexity of rescue operations, the full operation of a robot can not be constantly supervised by a human operator, i.e., the robots have to be semi-autonomous. This paper describes how the main challenge of safe operation under semi-autonomous control can in general be solved. The key elements are a special software architecture and a scheduling framework that ensure Quality of Service (QoS) and Fail-Safe Guarantees (FSG) despite the unpredictable performance of standard Internet/Intranet-technologies, especially when wireless components are involved.