Legged and Flying Robots for Disaster Response

Disaster response is among the most important tasks in need for autonomous robots, but also one of the most challenging for robots operation. While robots are already doing an effective job as factory work-horses or floor cleaning devices, operations in highly unstructured and unknown environments, as encountered after disasters, is still a major challenge. Within this paper we will present and discuss our latest research results with legged, tracked, and flying robot systems designed to support disaster response operations. We will elaborate on the design of our quadruped walking robots, our solar airplane as well as our findings in localization, mapping and path planning for disaster response.

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