A roadmap for the adoption of unmanned systems into public safety

The IEEE Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics community has created a roadmap for producing unmanned systems that could be adopted by the Public Safety sector within 10 years, given appropriate R&D investment especially in human-robot interaction and perception. The five applications expected to be of highest value to the Public Safety community, highest value first, are: assisting with routine inspection of the critical infrastructure, “chronic emergencies” such as firefighting, hazardous material spills, port inspection, and damage estimation after a disaster. The technical feasibility of the applications were ranked, with the most attractive scenario, infrastructure inspection, rated as the second easiest scenario; this suggests the maturity of robotics technology is beginning to match stakeholder needs. Each of the five applications were discussed in terms of the six broad enabling technology areas specified in the current National Robotics Initiative Roadmap (perception, human-robot interaction, mechanisms, modeling and simulation, control and planning, and testing and evaluation) and nine specific capabilities identified by the community as being essential to commercialization (communication, alerting, localization, fault tolerance, mapping, manpower needs, plug and play capabilities, multiple users, and multiple robots). The community believes that perception and human-robot interaction are the two biggest barriers to adoption, and require more research, given that their low technical maturity (3rd and 6th rank respectively). However, each of the specific capabilities needed for commercialization are being addressed by current research and could be achieved within 10 years with sustained funding.