Urban search and rescue (USAR) robots have the potential of identifying the location of trapped people following a disaster. The majority of survivors in open spaces will be rapidly located and extracted by rescue personnel. Therefore, the greatest challenge for rescue robotics is to penetrate deep within collapsed buildings to search for survivors. In this paper, several robotic challenges are...

This paper addresses object detection and tracking in high-resolution omnidirectional images. The foreseen application is a visual subsystem of a rescue robot equipped with an omnidirectional camera, which demands real time efficiency and robustness against changing viewpoint. Object detectors typically do not guarantee specific frame rate. The detection time may vastly depend on a scene comple...

Motion planning for robots operating on 3D rough terrain requires the synergy of various robotic capabilities, from sensing and perception to simulation, planning and prediction. In this paper, we focus on the higher level of this pipeline where by means of physics-based simulation and geometric processing we extract the information that is semantically required for an articulated, tracked robo...

Behavioural cloning is an approach where an agent observes the actions of a human operator and then tries to generalise their behaviour. Successful applications include pilotting aircraft in simulation (Sammut et al., 1992) and operating container cranes (Urbancic and Bratko, 1994). In this work, we examine the application of behavioural cloning to autonomous navigation of a robot in an unstruc...

In this paper, we discuss the design of a novel robotic platform for Urban Search and Rescue (USAR). The system developed possesses unique mobility capabilities based on a new adjustable compliance mechanism and overall locomotive morphology. The main facets of this work involve the morphological concepts, initial design and construction of a prototype vehicle, and a physical simulation to be u...

On land, on water, and in the air, disaster response is always a race against time in order to reach out to as many survivors as possible. Rescue robotics is an emerging technology that can be of great use for accelerating this search, and thus for saving human lives. While there has been a notable increase in the deployment of rescue robots for local incidents and disasters, there remain core ...

As the complexity of tasks envisioned for robotic systems increases, their decision making module needs to be capable of concurrently evaluating and trading off multiple, possibly contradicting and stochastic objectives. For example, a rescue robot might be required to plan trajectories so as to maximize the probability of success to reach a critical location and, at the same time, minimize the...

A four-legged pneumatically actuated search and rescue robot is presented as a system with potentially enhanced versatility relative to existing rescue robots. The usage of fluid powered actuation, combined with tele-operation of the robot via an operator workstation, enables the twelve degree of freedom robot to better manipulate large objects. A simulation is developed to enable ease of desig...

This article explores human–robot interaction during a 16-hr, high-fidelity urban search and rescue disaster response drill with teleoperated robots. This article examines operator situation awareness and technical search team interaction using communication analysis. It analyzes situation awareness, team communication, and the interaction of these constructs using a systematic coding scheme de...

Robots have replaced humans in the collaboration of performing those dreary and hazardous tasks which humans prefer not to do so or are unable to do. The principles of mechanics, electronics and computer science are helpful in making a robot intelligent. Tele-operation of robots is the great idea to handle threatened tasks in which human operates the robot without being at the place physically....