Preface

2011 was a special year for safety, security, and rescue robotics (SSRR). It is the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in the USA. The great east Japan earthquake on 3/11 caused a complex disaster with seismic motion, a Tsunami, and an accident of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. These disasters have shown the importance of research on SSRR in a very emphatic way. Despite its high expectation, interests, and social impacts, the field of SSRR requires radically new approaches for significant breakthroughs. From this standpoint, this special issue aims to provide a comprehensive overview of this active and important research area with the latest results on SSRR technologies. We have selected seven articles for inclusion in this special issue from 24 that were originally submitted. The article by Ramazan Havangi et al. proposes an intelligent simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) method with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo move step to solve drawbacks of FastSLAM by improving UFastSLAM. In the article, by David Portugal and Rui P. Rocha, a comparison of five different patrolling strategies using distinct topological environments and different team sizes in order to analyze the performance and scalability of each approach is presented. Quirin Hamp et al. present in their article results from evaluating search teams in simulated urban search and rescue (USAR) scenarios equipped with newly developed technical search means and digital data input terminals developed in the German I-LOV project. The article by Yungeun Choe et al. deals with an urban structure classification method that is suitable for practical robots in terms of memory requirement, computational time, and classification accuracy. In the article by Wing-Yue Geoffrey Louie and Goldie Nejat Louie, a victim identification methodology for robots in cluttered USAR using both human geometric and skin region features is presented. Masaru Shimizu and Tomoichi Takahashi propose an event-generation function for a training platform and discuss the effectiveness of pair operations for multiple rescue robots under unstable and dynamically changing environments. Seonghee Jeong and Takayuki Takahashi present in their article a unified evaluation index which is capable of evaluating together the safety and dexterity of a human symbiotic manipulator and evaluate a two-link manipulator using the index as a case study.