The RoboCup Rescue competition aims at boosting research in robots and infrastructure able to help in real rescue missions. The task is to find and report victims in areas of different grades of roughness, which are currently indoor. It challenges to some extreme the mobility of robot platforms as well as the autonomy of their control and sensor interpretation software. In the 2004 competition,...

In order to further improve the ability of global path planning of coal mine rescue robot in the complex environment, a bacterial foraging algorithm-based polyclonal selection algorithm (BFA-PSA) is proposed. In order to verify the superiority of the BFA-PSA, the proposed algorithm is tested by traveling salesman problem (TSP) and compared with genetic algorithm (GA) and clonal selection algori...

Rescue robots operate in disaster areas where odometric information is known to be highly unreliable. This paper presents a new approach to odometry independent 2D robot mapping. Scans obtained from different robot positions are assembled to a single global map using alignment based on scan intrinsic information only, namely shape features. The approach detects geometric structures in different...

field of rescue robotics. The purpose of the annual summer field institute is to put scientists directly in the field with rescue professionals and fieldable rescue robots to better understand the domain and conduct experiments. The institute is part of the Rescue Robots for Research and Response (R4) Program sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and En...

A semi-autonomously controlled fluid-powered legged search and rescue robot is proposed as a solution to the everincreasing demand for more versatile rescue robot technology. The success of such a robot is dependent on the existence of a user interface that optimizes the balance between user and machine decisions and provides the operator with the appropriate amount of information to soundly ma...