This paper applies our developed novice users oriented force feedback steering wheel interface and mouse interface to navigating a tank type rescue robot. By analyzing merits and limitation of operating each interface, we propose a combined navigation strategy by the two interfaces. The steering wheel interface consists of a force feedback steering control and a six monitors’ wall. Through this...

This paper discusses the advancement and proliferation of the Reference Test Arenas for Urban Search and Rescue Robots as representative search and rescue environments, which allow objective performance evaluation of mobile robot capabilities. These arenas have hosted annual rescue robot competitions sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence since 2000 and the RoboCupRes...

Two challenges for rescue robots are to detect human beings and to have an accurate positioning system. In indoor positioning, GPS receivers cannot be used due to the reflections or attenuation caused by obstacles. To detect human beings, sensors such as thermal camera, ultrasonic and microphone can be embedded on the rescue robot. The drawback of these sensors is the detection range. These sen...

Robot Urban Search and Rescue is a new task in robotics that is challenging not only robot hardware, but also humanrobot interfaces. It is a real-world challenge in an unstructured environment that requires cooperation between a remote robot and a human operator. The study of humanrobot interfaces is still in its infancy, and most of the urban search & rescue systems field so far use an ad hoc ...

Deploying rescue workers in an urban setting is often a perilous, time-, power-, and force-consuming job, and robot systems to assist in this effort are needed. A fundamental task for rescuer is to localize and salvage injured persons. To this end, robotic systems are used for mapping a site and for remote inspection of suspicious objects. The mobile robot Kurt3D is the first rescue robot that ...

Rescue operation in coal mine is extremely dangerous due to several factors. It is particularly very harmful for the rescuers to get into the coal mine tunnel in disaster without the prior knowledge of environment because the subsequent explosions may likely to occur at any time it is therefore essential to detect the explosive environment details such as toxic gases, high temperatures and also...

The default solution for mobile robot communication is RFnetworking, typically based on one of the IEEE 802.11 standards also known as WLAN technology. Radio communication frees the robots from umbilical cords. But it suffers from several significant drawbacks, especially limited bandwidth and range. The limitations of both aspects are in addition hard to predict as they are strongly dependent ...

In this paper we describe a new approach to make use of a heterogeneous robot team for the RoboCup Rescue League Virtual Robot competition. We will demonstrate coordinated action between a flying and a ground robot. The flying robot is used for fast exploration and allows the operator to find the places where victims are present in the environment. Due to the fast aggregation of the location er...

Nowadays the presence of robots is a must in many fields. One of these, is assisting and rescuing injured people in a disaster such as earthquake, flood, ... where the human assistance is difficult due to hard and dangerous conditions and long delays, in such cases robots can be used to detect victims and report their locations to rescuers. One of the most useful tools is IR (InfraRed) Camera. ...