RoboCupRescue Simulation League

This paper overviews all results of RoboCupRescue simulation league at 2002. RoboCupRescue simulation has a lot in common with RoboCupSoccer simulation. It handles distributed, multiagent domains and agents do their tasks with limited communication and sensing abilities. The distinctions between rescue and soccer are scales of domain, multiple hierarchies in agents and interactions with various disaster simulations [1]. The agents are firefighters, police workers, ambulance workers and their control centers. The basis of RoboCupRescue is a disaster rescue scenario in which the rescue agents attempt to minimize damages to civilians and buildings after an earthquake. Agents in a competing rescue team do rescue operations in a disaster world, and cooperate each other to save buried ones, to extinguish fires, to repair roads, etc. The teams do not compete against each other directly like games in RoboCupSoccer. They operate independently in the copies of a disaster world and compare their performance. It provides not only a platform for Multi-Agent System research domain but also a prototype system for decision support system at public offices.