Mobile robots are increasingly becoming an aid to humans in accomplishing dangerous tasks. Examples of such tasks include search and rescue missions, military missions, surveillance, scheduled operations (such as checking the reactor of a nuclear plant), and so forth. The advantage of using robots in such situations is that they accomplish high-risk task without exposing humans to danger: robot...

The paper describes experience with applying a user-centric design methodology in developing systems for human-robot teaming in Urban Search & Rescue. A human-robot team consists of several semi-autonomous robots (rovers/UGVs, microcopter/UAVs), several humans at an off-site command post (mission commander, UGV operators) and one on-site human (UAV operator). This system has been developed in c...

We present a system to increase the performance of feature correspondence based alignment algorithms for laser scan data. Alignment approaches for robot mapping, like ICP or FFS, perform successfully only under the condition of sufficient feature overlap between single scans. This condition is often not met, e.g. in sparsely scanned environments or disaster areas for search and rescue robot tas...

This paper describes a method of enhancing feedback for Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) robot operators through the use of a wearable vibrotactile display. The display provides vibrotactile feedback corresponding to sensor data collected by the robot. A USAR robot may be equipped with a variety of sensors including proximity, temperature, motion, and many others. The system described here is int...

As robots are increasingly used in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions, it becomes highly relevant to study how SAR robots can be developed and deployed in a responsible way. In contrast to some other robot application domains, e.g. military and healthcare, the ethics of robot-assisted SAR are relatively under examined. This paper aims to fill this gap by assessing and analyzing important values a...

This paper describes MRESim, a multi-robot exploration simulator which aims to provide a middle ground between the RoboCup Agent and Virtual Robot competitions. A detailed description of this new infrastructure is provided, followed by examples and case studies of successful research outcomes arising from the use of MRESim. Our work on MRESim won the 2014 Infrastructure competition of the RoboC...

We describe our initial steps toward the realization of a robotic system for assisting fire-fighting and rescue services. The system implements the concept of shared autonomy between the robot and the human operator: the mobile robot performs local navigation, sensing and mapping, while the operator interprets the sensor data and provides strategic navigation goals.

The Virtual Robots (VR) competition using the USARSim simulator began in 2006 in Bremen as a parallel activity of teams actively competing in Rescue Robot competitions. The competition has benefited the robotics research community by accelerating the development of and maintaining research infrastructure (USARSim) and by focusing competitions on issues meaningful to research including multirobo...

Aiming at completing search task under disaster condition problems, an optimizing strategy based on multisensor information fusion is proposed in this paper. Firstly, search and rescue robot control system hardware circuit is designed; secondly, embedded system software design is realized; and then, a polymerization Kalman filtering model is proposed, it uses local Kalman filter weights schedul...

This paper describes and evaluates the use of a head-mounted display (HMD) for the teleoperation of a field robot. The HMD presents a pair of video streams to the operator (one to each eye) originating from a pair of stereo cameras located on the front of the robot, thus providing him/her with a sense of depth (stereopsis). A tracker on the HMD captures 3-DOF head orientation data which is then...