Robocup 2008 will be held in Suzhou, China
http://robocup-cn.org/
Building Rescue Systems of the Future
Disaster management is one of the most serious social issue which involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment.
The lessons learnt from the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake concluded that information systems should be built with the following requirements:
- Collection, accumulation, relay, selection, summarisation, and distribution of necessary information.
- Prompt support for planning disaster mitigation, search and rescue.
- Reliability and robustness of the system during routine and emergency operations.
Given the above requirements, the intention of the RoboCup Rescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels involving multi-agent team work coordination, physical robotic agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive systems in future.
This problem introduces researchers advanced and interdisciplinary research themes. As AI/robotics research, for example, behavior strategy (e.g. multi-agent planning, realtime/anytime planning, heterogeneity of agents, robust planning, mixed-initiative planning) is a challenging problem. For disaster researchers, RoboCupRescue works as a standard basis in order to develop practical comprehensive simulators adding necessary disaster modules.
RobocupRescue initialtives are divided into two main strands:
- The RoboCupRescue Simulation Project is an open resource of research results. This project is itself divided into two main strands, namely the Virtual Robots and the Agents Simulation projects which target various challenges that exist at the single robot level and the multi-agent system level.
- The challenges for robots in the Real Robots project range from mechatronics for advanced locomotion over perception and planning up to providing full autonomy. The robots are evaluated in special test settings, the NIST rescue arenas.
