Toward Autonomous Rescue Robots

Mobile robots can be highly valuable tools in Urban Rescue Missions, inspecting collapsed buildings, assessing the situation, looking for victims and establishing a first contact to them. At the International University Bremen (IUB), rescue robots for these tasks are developed. The American National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a special testing arena based on data from real catastrophes. This paper describes the IUB rescue robots that have been tested in the NIST arena during RoboCup 2002 in Fukuoka, Japan. The robots are semi-autonomous mobile robots providing streams of video and other essential data via wireless connections to human operated base-stations. All components of the robots, ranging from mechanics over computational hardware to all software levels have been to a large extent custom designed for the difficult task of rescue missions. This paper gives a short overview of all components, but it focuses especially on the implementation of the data streams from and to the robots.