A high-quality human-robot interface is essential for the success of search and rescue operations in urban environments that are too challenging for fully-autonomous operation. Teleoperating multiple robots greatly increases the complexity of the human’s cognitive task, since the operator’s concentration is divided among multiple robots. Thus, simply adding more robots to the system does not ne...

This paper introduces a search-and-rescue robot system used for remote sensing of the underground coal mine environment, which is composed of an operating control unit and two mobile robots with explosion-proof and waterproof function. This robot system is designed to observe and collect information of the coal mine environment through remote control. Thus, this system can be regarded as a mult...

In highly complex domains such as disaster rescue, today’s mobile robots simply do not have the ability to perform successfully on their own. Human teleoperation is strongly relied upon, but this also has problems: humans suffer from cognitive overload and have difficulties in constructing a representation of the space around a robot given information from its senses. In this paper we describe ...

The robotics team at Utah State University has been working on incrementally building the capabilities needed to field an autonomous swarm of rescue robots. We believe a swarm of small, low-cost robots that can identify areas needing further investigation would be of great benefit to first responders to the scene of a disaster. Blue Swarm 3 is the latest iteration in this development process an...

This paper describes an extension of scripts, which have been used to control sequences of robot behavior, to facilitate human-robot coordination. The script mechanism permits the human to both conduct expected, complementary activities with the robot and to intervene opportunistically taking direct control. Scripts address the six major issues associated with human-robot coordination. They all...

In this paper we described the hardware architecture of an inexpensive, heterogeneous, mobile robot swarm, designed and developed at RISC lab, University of Bridgeport. Each UB robot swarm is equipped with sensors, actuators, control and communication units, power supply, and interconnection mechanism. Robot swarms have become a new research paradigm in the last ten years offering novel approac...

This paper presents a servo-based Four-Legged robot – named AIMEE – for the RoboCup Rescue competition (see [1] for details). The robot is described with regard to the mechanics which are based on a very modular construction kit, the electronics based on a custom-made MPC 565 microcontroller board, and a software concept using a new behavior-based microkernel. The bio-inspired control approach ...

Abstract: Rescue robots are prime examples of cyber-physical systems which are characterized by a tight combination of the system’s computational and physical elements. In this paper we analyze the requirements of such a system and propose a generic formulation that can be used to design software frameworks for this field. We present the rescue robot system GETbot organized and configured accor...

Rescue robotics is an important steppingstone in the scientific challenge to create autonomous systems. There is a significant market for rescue robots, which has unique features that allow a fruitful combination of application oriented developments and basic research. Unlike other markets for advanced robotics systems like service robots, the rescue robotics domain benefits from the fact that ...

This paper describes a novel approach, called Force Field Simulation, to multi robot mapping that works under the constraints given in autonomous search and rescue robotics. Extremely poor prealignment, lack of landmarks, and minimal overlap between scans are the main challenges. The presented algorithm solves the alignment problem of such laser scans utilizing a gradient descent approach motiv...