-This paper presents a field report and summarizes the problems of the appliance of rescue robots during the Collapse of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne. Two robots where on the field, ready to be applied: A shoe-box size tracked mobile robot (VGTV Xtreme) and a caterpillar like system (Active Scope Camera). Due to the special type of collapse and design limitations of the robots, both robotic systems could not be applied. Either they could not reach voids or did not fit into, or could not be controlled from a safe distance. The faced problems have been analyzed and are described in this paper.

This paper presents a novel approach for representing and maintaining a shared 3D world model for robotic applications. This approach is based on the scene graph concept which has been adapted to the requirements of the robotic domain. A key feature is the temporal and centralized sharing of all available 3D data in the leaves of the graph structure. The approach enables tracking of dynamic objects, incorporates uncertainty and allows for annotations by semantic tags.A demonstration is given for a perception application that exploits the temporal sharing of 3D data. A Region of Interest (ROI) is extracted from the stored scene data in order to accelerate processing cycle times.

In this work a graph-based, semantic mapping approach for indoor robotics applications is presented, which is extending OpenStreetMap (OSM) with robotic-specific, semantic, topological, and geometrical information. Models are introduced for basic indoor structures such as walls, doors, corridors, elevators, etc. The architectural principles support composition with additional domain and application-specific knowledge. As an example, a model for an area is introduced, and it is explained how this can be used in navigation. A key advantage of the proposed graph-based map representation is that it allows exploiting the hierarchical structure of the graphs. Finally, the compatibility of the approach with existing, gridbased motion planning algorithms is shown.

Abstract-This paper presents a distributed world model that is able to adapt to changes in the Quality of Service (QoS) of the communication layer by online reconfiguration of perception algorithms. The approach consists of (a) a mechanism for storage, exchange and processing of world model data and (b) a feedback loop that incorporates reasoning techniques to adapt to QoS changes immediately. The latter introduces a Level of Detail (LoD) metric based on a spatial resolution in order to infer an upper bound for the amount of data that can be transmitted without violating an application specific transmission delay.Experiments have been performed with Octree-based subsampling techniques applied to data originating from a RGB-D camera using simulated and real-world data sets for timevarying bandwidth values as employed QoS measure.

No abstract