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Robotic Assembly
Edited by Professor Stephen Derby
1 Introduction
Search and rescue in emergency scenarios arising from natural and man-made disasters is one important application of mobile robots. After an earthquake or the collapse of a built structure, and facing a scenario of large destruction, the response time to search and locate trapped survivors is crucial as it is known that after 48 h of the disaster the probability of survival is low. The human intervention of urban search and rescue (USAR) teams, including USAR dogs, has to be done cautiously so as to protect the rescue workers from further collapses. Debris may be so cluttered that prevent the close human access to the victims. Also, potential risk of further landslide requires the propping of the structures before human intervention. Rescue preparation operations may be time consuming, and a fast action to locate survivors and to take them human voices, light and/or water is a crucial factor for life. Therefore, there is the clear need for search and rescue robots that are small, cheap and light, and that can be released immediately after a disaster in which the conditions are too dangerous and too cluttered for people and dogs to begin searching for victims.
The most well-known work on USAR robots in the USA has been carried out by [1] Casper and Murphy (2003), namely on the usage of several tele-operated robots for real search and rescue missions, in cooperation with professional human teams, including the participation in the rescue operations of the World Trade Center (WTC), after the September 11 attacks. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has also developed the USAR Performance Metrics and Test Arena ([3] Jacoff et al. , 2003), a real scenario which emulates several real-world situations faced by human teams after an earthquake, which has been widely used worldwide, e.g. in Europe, at the Intelligent Systems for Emergencies and Civil Defense in Rome, Italy, and which has been serving as the testbed for the RoboCup Rescue initiative ([4] Tadokoro et al. , 2000), which joins together annually dozens of teams in a search and rescue robotic competition.
This strong worldwide interest in search and rescue robots research and development has attracted several companies that have developed USAR commercial...