Inside the RoboCup Rescue Simulation League, the mission is to use robots to rescue as many victims as possible after a disaster. The research challenge is to let the robots cooperate as a team. This year in total 15 teams from 8 different countries have been active in the competition. This paper highlights the approaches of the winners of the virtual robot competition, the infrastructure compe...

In order to fulfill its mission, a search and rescue system must be able to both quickly and reliably locate victims within the search space. Current search and rescue approaches generally rely on either teleoperated robots, or teams of wireless robots. Since typically the robots used in these systems employ sophisticated hardware components and are few in number, system cost tends to be high a...

We present an implemented algorithm f o r a distributed team of autonomous mobile robots to search for an object. When one robot finds i t , they all gather around it, and then manipulate (“rescue”) i t . The algorithm exploits parallelism, with all robots searching concurrently, and also teamwork, because the manipulation is performed cooperatively. Our algorithm is fully distributed; the robo...

petition was held in the summer of 2001 in conjunction with the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Urban Search and Rescue event, eerily preceding the September 11 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Four teams responded to the WTC disaster through the auspices of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), directed by John Blitch. The four teams were Foster-Miller and iRobot (both robo...

The Stony Brook Robot Design Team has focused on two main areas of research in the creation of NavBot, our new robot created for the American Association of Artificial Intelligence's (AAAI) Scavenger Hunt Event: navigation and computer vision. The purpose is to create an intelligent machine that is able to navigate the conference floor for specific objects at the AAAI Conference in Pittsburgh, ...

Wheeled and tracked vehicles are mainly suitable for relatively flat terrain. Legged vehicles, on the other hand, have the potential to handle a wide variety of terrain. This article presents a new locomotion concept, adapted to both flat and complex rough terrain by combining the advantages of wheeled and legged vehicels. MATE-1 is a bipedal robot equipped with two special grippers which provi...

The sensors include sonar, cameras, keyboard, the dead reckoning position and a microphone. The drivers for using these sensors, as well as a library for writing behaviors, were provided with the ActivMedia robot. We produced a map of the competition areas in advance using a tape measure. On this map we drew a graph of places that the robot could go from any given place. This map was not only u...

The aim of this paper is to give an innovative concept to handle the bore well rescue operations without human intervention and to inspect any type of leakage in the pipe. Normal operation of child rescue is done by using big machines with large manpower involvement. It takes more time to rescue a child from the bore well and to check any kind of irregularities in pipe. Wheeled leg mechanism is...

Designing robots for urban search and rescue (USAR) is an extremely challenging task, because it violates many of the assumptions made in the average robotics lab. Robocup Rescue [Jacoff et al., 2004] is an international competition that provides an opportunity to measure performance in such environments objectively. The competition allows for the evaluation of new and evolving sensing, hardwar...

Today’s artificial intelligence technology is insufficient to support autonomous task performance in complex domains such as urban search and rescue, forcing human teleoperation of robots to be extensively relied upon. This, however, also has problems: humans quickly suffer from cognitive overload, and have difficulties in constructing a representation of the space around a remotely-placed robo...