National Science Foundation Summer Field Institute for Rescue Robots for Research and Response (R4)

field of rescue robotics. The purpose of the annual summer field institute is to put scientists directly in the field with rescue professionals and fieldable rescue robots to better understand the domain and conduct experiments. The institute is part of the Rescue Robots for Research and Response (R4) Program sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate. The R4 program is a three-year grant whose goal is to facilitate information technology research into robotassisted urban search and rescue (USAR) by providing access to domain experts, meaningful test sites, and expensive specialized equipment. All equipment used for the R4 program is fieldable, so the grant also increases the availability of mobile robots and sensors for an emergency response, such as the World Trade Center disaster. The specific objective of this field institute was to embed 15 scientists with rescue workers as they went through a complete deploy-searchcleanup cycle or “evolution.” FEMA response force Indiana Task Force 1 (INTF-1) hosted the event and served as subject-matter experts with the CRASAR response team and members ■ Fifteen scientists from six universities and five companies were embedded with a team of search and rescue professionals from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Indiana Task Force 1 in August 2003 at a demolished building in Lebanon, Indiana. The highly realistic 27-hour exercise enabled participants to identify the prevailing issues in rescue robotics. Perception and situation awareness were deemed the most pressing problems, with a recommendation to focus on human-computer cooperative algorithms because recognition in dense rubble appears far beyond the capabilities of computer vision for the near term. Human-robot interaction was cited as another critical area as well as the general problem of how the robot can maintain communications with the rescuers. The field exercise was part of an ongoing grant from the National Science Foundation to the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), and CRASAR is sponsoring similar activities in summer 2004.