We describe our entry in the AAAI 2002 Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) competition, a marsupial team consisting of a larger wheeled robot and several small legged robots, carried around by the larger robot. This setup exploits complimentary strengths of each robot type in a challenging domain. We describe both the hardware and software architecture, and the on-board real-time mapping which forms...

Mapping environments is a fundamental task for a rescue robot. In this paper we present techniques that we have developed for mapping rescue environments within the SPQR-Rescue team participating in the RoboCup 2004 Real Rescue competition. After an analysis of existing techniques for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) we have devised a method suitable for planar environment (i.e. yel...

2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan ∗4Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, Tsukuba University 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8577, Japan ∗5Department of Informatics, School of Multidisciplinary Sciences, SOKENDAI 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan ∗6Graduate School of Information Science, Tohoku University 6-6-01 Aramaki Aza Aoba, Ao...

Mabel (the Mobile Table) is a robotic system that can perform waypoint navigation, speech generation, speech recognition, natural language understanding, face finding, face following, nametag reading, and localization. Mabel can interact intelligently to give information about the conference to patrons. Major additions to this year’s design are Monte Carlo Localization, Filter-Cascade technique...

Agents are autonomous entities which can sense from and act on environment. Agents could be programs, robot’s control systems or entire robots. We propose a general agent paradigm, in which learning, communication, knowledge, and other key factors are clearly divided and integrated. The agent paradigm tries to integrate learning, communication, and knowledge in a general way regardless of probl...

This paper describes the software system supporting the Carnegie Mellon/Univ. of Pittsburgh team of simulated search and rescue robots in the Robocup Rescue 2010 Virtual Robots competition. Building on the Machinetta agent software, robot command and control is decomposed into a hierarchy of subtasks managed by independent agents both on the robot and colocated with human operators. By encapsul...

Mabel (the Mobile Table) is a robotic system that can perform waypoint navigation, speech generation, speech recognition, natural language understanding, face finding, face following, nametag reading, and localization. Mabel can interact intelligently to give information about the conference to patrons. Major additions to this year’s design are Monte Carlo Localization, Filter-Cascade technique...

Urban search and rescue is a difficult domain for autonomous mobile robots to operate in. The environment can be expected to be highly unstructured, with many obstacles and hazards for a robot to deal with. In addition, if human rescue teams are going to accept robotic assistance, they need to be assured that the robots are going to be helpful, not a hindrance. With these factors in mind, we ha...

The utilization of mobile rescue robots in dynamic environments decreases the risk to emergency personnel in the field. Recent efforts to improve rescue robot design by using new fluid-power technology provide opportunities of studying the changes in metrics of human-robot interaction (HRI), such as trust. Trust is one of the most critical factors in urban search and rescue missions because it ...

In this paper we examine the case of a mobile robot that is part of a human-robot urban search and rescue (USAR) team. During USAR scenarios, we would like the robot to have a geometrical-functional understanding of space, using which it can infer where to perform planned tasks in a manner that mimics human behavior. We assess the situation awareness of rescue workers during a simulated USAR sc...