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...

Search and rescue operations in large disaster sites require quick gathering of relevant information. Both the knowledge of the location of victims and the environmental/structural conditions must be available to safely and efficiently guide rescue personnel. A major hurdle for robots in such scenarios is stairs. A system for autonomous surmounting of stairs is proposed in which a Scout robot j...

The development of an artificial agent-driven rescue robot capable of interacting naturally with humans under urban emergency conditions brings out a number of issues that need to be addressed: among these are (i) providing a full description and understanding of the user’s perspective, and thus creating a reliable and functional user model, (ii) addressing the question of appearance, including...

Robots are able to enter concealed and unstable environments inaccessible to rescuers. Previous Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) robots have experienced problems with malfunction of communication systems, traction systems, control and telemetry. These problems were accessed and improved in developing a prototype robot called CAESAR, which is an acronym for Contractible Arms Elevating Search And R...

Mobile robot is an autonomous agent capable of navigating intelligently anywhere using sensor-actuator control techniques. The applications of the autonomous mobile robot in many fields such as industry, space, defence and transportation, and other social sectors are growing day by day. The mobile robot performs many tasks such as rescue operation, patrolling, disaster relief, planetary explora...

In this article, we present the design of a team of heterogeneous, centimeter-scale robots – called Millibots that coordinate to provide real-time surveillance and reconnaissance. The robot team exploits modular sensing, processing and mobility to achieve a wide range of tasks that include mapping and exploration as well as support for fire rescue. To achieve extended team operation in the face...

Foraging is a benchmark problem in robotics especially for distributed autonomous robotic systems. The systematic study of robot foraging is important for several reasons: firstly, because foraging is a metaphor for the broad class of problems integrating robotic exploration, navigation and object identification, manipulation and transport; secondly, in multi-robot systems foraging is a canonic...

We are working to develop an information gathering system comprising a mobile robot and a wireless sensor network (WSN) for use in post-disaster underground environments. In the proposed system, a mobile robot carries wireless sensor nodes and deploys them to construct a WSN in the environment, thus providing a wireless communication infrastructure for mobile robot teleoperation. An operator th...

The rescue robots developed at the International University Bremen (IUB) are semi-autonomous mobile robots providing streams of video and other essential data via wireless connections to human operated basestations, supplemented by various basic and optional behaviors on board of the robots. Due to the limitations of wireless connections and the complexity of rescue operations, the full operati...

With the progress made in active exploration, the robots of the UvA Rescue Team are capable of making deliberative decisions about the frontiers to be explored. The robots select the frontiers with maximum information gain. The robots incorporate the positions of their team mates in their decisions, to optimize the gain for the team as a whole. The active exploration is based on the shared occu...