Orpheus mobile robot is a teleoperated device primarily designed for remote exploration of hazardous places and rescue missions. The robot is able to operate both indoors and outdoors, is made to be durable and reliable. The device is controlled through advanced user interface with joystick and head mounted display with inertial head movement sensor. To increase the system’s operability in diff...

The Centibots were tested, by an independent evaluation team, in an artificial "search and rescue" scenario. The key was to evaluate how to control the robots, how to deploy them, and how effective they are in the mission. The focus of the project was not on making more robotic hardware but to focus on the large-scale aspect and on the control aspect of the problem. NIST(1) runs the USAR progra...

Urban Search And Rescue is a growing area of robotic research. The RoboCup Federation has recognized this, and has created the new Virtual Robots competition to complement its existing physical robot and agent competitions. In order to successfully compete in this competition, teams need to field multi-robot solutions that cooperatively explore and map an environment while searching for victims...

Remote operations in harsh environments, such as those found in the search & rescue and humanitarian demining domains, achieve better results when a strong interaction among users and robots is considered. In addition, robots should be disposable and robust, which can be achieved through parsimonious design. This paper presents a multi-agent system to solve the n-humans and m-robots problem. In...

A novel, miniature robot designed to use its two arms for both manipulation and locomotion is described. Intended for military and civilian surveillance and search-and-rescue applications, the robot must be small, rugged, and lightweight, hence the desire for dual-use. The robot consists of two, three-degree-of-freedom arms that can stow completely inside the 75 mm diameter cylindrical body for...

Using this technique, a robot can operate in an environment without a priori knowledge of a map and its location in the world. This is a critical skill that can be utilized in a wide range of applications that require a robot to be able to explore a region and return to its starting location, learn different paths to key locations in a world, and to traverse a region completely. Such applicatio...

We aim to develop an online method for learning robot behaviours that requires only a small number of trials, making it practical for use on a real robot. A hybrid method includes a symbolic planner, using qualitative reasoning, that constructs an approximate solution to a control problem. This approximate solution provides constraints for a numerical optimisation algorithm, which is used to re...

Coordinating a group of robots to work in formation has been suggested for a number of tasks, such as urban searchand-rescue, traffic control, and harvesting solar energy. Algorithms for controlling robot formations have been inspired by biological and organizational systems. In our approach to robot formation control, each robot is treated like a cell in a cellular automaton, where local inter...

Using this technique, a robot can operate in an environment without a priori knowledge of a map and its location in the world. This is a critical skill that can be utilized in a wide range of applications that require a robot to be able to explore a region and return to its starting location, learn different paths to key locations in a world, and to traverse a region completely. Such applicatio...

A shape-shifting robot with changeable configurations can accomplish search and rescue tasks which could not be achieved by manpower sometimes. The accessibility of this robot to uneven environment was efficiently enlarged by changing its configuration. In this paper, a path planning method is presented that integrates the reconfigurable ability of the robot with the potential field law. An ada...