Proposals for New UGV, UMV, UAV, and HRI standards for rescue robots

Abstract

This paper summarizes the recommended additions to standards being developed by the ASTM E54.08 Homeland Security committee from the NSF-JST-NIST Workshop on Rescue Robotics held at Texas A&M, March 8-11, 2010, concurrently with the NIST Response Robot Evaluation Exercise #6. The 50 workshop participants represented sixteen universities in the USA, Japan, and China. Over a dozen land, marine, and aerial vehicles were tested at Disaster City R . The workshop produced two recommendations for standards for unmanned ground vehicles, four for small unmanned aerial systems, and two for unmanned marine vehicles, as well as proposed four topics for human-robot interaction evaluation. The eight recommendations were presented at the ASTM meeting on March 12, 2010, although test methods have not been developed or proposed for each new topic. The participants also identified four new classes of standards: tethers, damage to the environment, victim management, and multi-robot coordination and collaboration.

Few common failure cases in mobile robots

“…For a detailed analysis on failure scenarios (how and when a mobile robot could fail), refer [4]. Additionally, observing rescue robot design standards (in progress) from NIST and ASTM [5] could also be beneficial in avoiding the failure scenarios.…”

Wireless communication enhancement methods for mobile robots in radiation environments

“…Another important aspect to be considered is that the mobile robot deployed for remote inspection, surveying or rescue missions can fail due to various possibilities such as hardware or software failure, especially the effects of ionising radiation on the electronics on-board the robot. One can refer to [21], [22] for a detailed analysis on the categories of failure scenarios, how and when a mobile robot could fail providing experimental studies. These failure scenarios necessitate manual recovery (self-rescue) of the robot from the environment.…”