Rescue robotics — a crucial milestone on the road to autonomous systems

Abstract

In this article we argue that rescue robotics is an important steppingstone in the scientific challenge to create autonomous systems. We motivate why we believe that there is a significant market for rescue robots, which has unique features that allow a fruitful combination of application oriented developments and basic research. Based on several application examples, for example the estimate that about 2000 road accidents per year in Germany alone involve hazardous goods, we conclude that there is a tremendous need for rescue robots. Unlike other markets for advanced robotics systems like service robots, the rescue robotics domain benefits from the fact that there is a human in the loop, which allows a stepwise transition from dumb teleoperated devices to truly autonomous systems. Current teleoperated devices are already very useful in this domain and they benefit from any bit of autonomy added as human rescue workers are a scarce resource at disaster scenarios and a single operator should ideally supervise a multitude of robots. We present results from the rescue robots and the International University Bremen (IUB) in a core area regarding autonomy, namely mapping.

Bore Well Rescue Robot With Life, Fracture and Distance Detection Technique

“…Robotics is a field which involves controlling of machines using computer, all these computer controlled machines or devices will execute the operations which require high accuracy or irksome or the work which results with causalities if they are done by the humans [1]. All the improvements in the computer technology, control devices along with improved control algorithms resulted with the enormously high speed , accurate and brilliant robots [2]. in these recent days it becoming a common tragedy that small kids and even adults and sometimes animals fell into the uncovered bore wells.…”

Autonomous transportation and deployment with aerial robots for search and rescue missions

“…Urban search and rescue (USAR) has been the most studied form of SAR in the robotics research community (Birk and Carpin, 2006;Gage et al, 2004;Poppinga et al, 2008;Murphy and Stover, 2008;Micire, 2008;Arai et al, 2008) and has become familiar as recent natural and man-made disasters have made the news the world over. On the opposite end of the spectrum, wilderness search and rescue (WiSAR) often involves only few victims with a large geographic search region (Goodrich et al, 2008).…”

Review article: locomotion systems for ground mobile robots in unstructured environments

“…Most mobile robots are designed to operate not only in structured environments but also in unstructured situations: important fields of application are homeland security (Murphy, 2004), surveillance (Quaglia et al, 2011), intervention in case of terrorist attacks (Birk and Carpin, 2006;Snyder, 2001), demining (Havlik, 2005;Cepolina and Hemapala, 2007), reconnaissance in dangerous situations (such as radioactive or chemical contamination; Hamel and Cress, 2001), agriculture (González et al, 2009;van Straten et al, 2002) and planetary exploration (Mishkin, 2004;Iagnemma and Dubowsky, 2004). Moreover, mobile robotics is a typical dual technology as it has significant military applications (Playter et al, 2006).…”

“…The works that have been quoted were selected to synthetically represent and compare all locomotion system categories. Broader bibliographies are available in Siegwart and Nourbakhsh (2004);Campion and Chung (2008); Kajita and Espiau (2008); Kemp et al (2008);Meyer and Guillot (2008).…”