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Autonomous mobile robots have the potential to solve missions that are either too complex or dangerous to be accomplished by humans. In this paper, we address the design and autonomous deployment of a ground vehicle equipped with a robotic arm for urban firefighting scenarios. We describe the hardware design and algorithm approaches for autonomous navigation, planning, fire source identification and abatement in unstructured urban scenarios. The approach employs on-board sensors for autonomous navigation and thermal camera information for source identification. A custom electro-mechanical pump is responsible to eject water for fire abatement. The proposed approach is validated through several experiments, where we show the ability to identify and abate a sample heat source in a building. The whole system was developed and deployed during the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020, for Challenge No. 3 -Fire Fighting Inside a High-Rise Building and during the Grand Challenge where our approach scored the highest number of points among all UGV solutions and was instrumental to win the first place.

In this paper we present an autonomous robotic system for picking, transporting, and precisely placing magnetically graspable objects. Such a system would be especially beneficial for construction tasks where human presence is not possible, e.g. due to chemical or radioactive pollution. The system comprises of two primary components – a wheeled, mobile platform and a manipulator arm. Both are interconnected through an onboard computer and utilize various onboard sensors for estimating the state of the robot and its surroundings. By using efficient processing algorithms, data from the onboard sensors can be used in a feedback loop during all critical operational sections, resulting in a robust system capable of operating on uneven terrain and in environments without access to satellite navigation. System functionality has been proven in Challenge II of the MBZIRC 2020 competition. The Challenge required a ground robot to build an L-shaped structure of colored bricks laid in a predefined pattern. Such a mission incorporates several demanding subchallenges, spanning multiple branches of computer science, cybernetics, and robotics. Moreover, all the subchallenges had to be performed flawlessly in rapid succession, in order to complete the Challenge successfully. The extreme difficulty of the task was highlighted in the MBZIRC 2020 finals, where our system was among the only two competitors (out of 32) that managed to complete the task in autonomous mode.

Autonomous mobile robots have the potential to execute missions that are either too complex or too dangerous for humans. In this paper, we address the design and deployment of an autonomous ground vehicle equipped with a robotic arm for urban firefighting scenarios. We describe hardware and algorithm designs for autonomous navigation, planning, fire source identification and abatement in unstructured urban scenarios. Our approach employs on-board sensors for autonomous navigation and thermal camera information for source identification. A custom electro–mechanical pump is responsible to eject water for fire abatement. The proposed approach is validated through several experiments, where we show the ability to identify and abate a simulated fire source in a building. The whole system was developed and deployed during the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020, for Challenge 3 – Fire Fighting Inside a High-Rise Building. Our approach was instrumental to win the first place in the MBZIRC Grand Challenge, which included the Challenge 3 as one its three tasks and it scored the highest number of points among all UGV solutions, while being the most compact one among all the teams.