Jennifer Casper

Human-robot interactions during the robot-assisted urban search and rescue response at the World Trade Center

The World Trade Center (WTC) rescue response provided an unfortunate opportunity to study the human-robot interactions (HRI) during a real unstaged rescue for the first time. A post-hoc analysis was performed on the data collected during the response, which resulted in 17 findings on the impact of the environment and conditions on the HRI: the skills displayed and needed by robots and humans, the details of the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) task, the social informatics in the USAR domain, and what information is communicated at what time. The results of this work impact the field of robotics by providing a case study for HRI in USAR drawn from an unstaged USAR effort. Eleven recommendations are made based on the findings that impact the robotics, computer science, engineering, psychology, and rescue fields. These recommendations call for group organization and user confidence studies, more research into perceptual and assistive interfaces, and formal models of the state of the robot, state of the world, and information as to what has been observed.

Mobility and sensing demands in USAR

Since 1999, the members of the Perceptual Robotics Laboratory at the University of South Florida have worked with the Hillsborough County Fire Department on identifying opportunities for robotics in urban search and rescue. This paper provides an introduction to the USAR environment and the impact on sensors and platforms. It discusses the possible roles of mobile robots, and the need for adjustable autonomy.

Potential Tasks and Research Issues for Mobile Robots in RoboCup Rescue

Previous work[5] has summarized our experiences working with the Hillsborough Fire Rescue Department and FEMA documents pertaining to Urban Search and Rescue. This paper discusses the lessons learned and casts them into four main categories of tasks for the physical agent portion of RoboCup-Rescue: 1) reconnaissance and site assessment, 2) rescuer safety, 3) victim detection, and 4) mapping and characterizing the structure.

Conflict Metric as a Measure of Sensing Quality

This paper shows that the Con metric from Dempster-Shafer theory is a good indicator of sensing quality, where an increase in the conflict metric value correlates with a decrease in map quality (at p ≤ 0.05). Two sets of experiments were conducted. In one, sonar data were gathered from a Nomad 200 robot operating in typical indoor hallways. Another used sonars on an RWI Urban robot in a confined, irregular tunnel built from eight different construction materials. For each set, an occupancy grid map was built and evaluated through a quantitative comparison with the ground truth. It is expected that the results of this study will generalize not only to other sensors and multi-sensor fusion, but any application where consistency can be assumed. It also contributes a design for an inexpensive reconfigurable confined space testbed.

Issues in intelligent robots for Search and Rescue

Since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and Kobe, Japan, earthquake, robotics researchers have been considering search and rescue as a humanitarian research domain. The recent devastation in Turkey and Taiwan, compounded with the new Robocup Rescue and AAAI Urban Search and Rescue robot competition, may encourage more research. However, roboticists generally go not have access to domain experts: the emergency workers or first providers. This paper shares our understanding of urban search and rescue, based on our active research in this area and training sessions with rescue workers from the Hillsborough County (Florida) Fire Departments. The paper is intended to be a stepping stone for roboticists entering the field.

AAAI/RoboCup-2001 Urban Search and Rescue Events

The RoboCup Rescue Physical Agent League Competition was held in the summer of 2001 in conjunction with the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Urban Search and Rescue event, eerily preceding the September 11 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Four teams responded to the WTC disaster through the auspices of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), directed by John Blitch. The four teams were Foster-Miller and iRobot (both robot manufacturers from the Boston area), the United States Navys Space Warfare Center (SPAWAR) group from San Diego, and the University of South Florida (USF). Blitch, through his position as program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Mobile Robots Program, was a supporter of the competition; he also served as a member of the rules committee and a judge. USF participated by chairing the rules committee, judging, assisting with the logistics, providing commentary, and demonstrating tethered and wireless robots whenever entrants had to skip around during the competition.Based on our experiences and history, we were asked to comment on the validity of the competition. The CRASAR collective experience suggests that most of the basic rules of the competition matched reality because the rules accurately reflected deployment scenarios, but the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Standard Test Course, and hardware or software approaches forwarded by competitors in last summers event, missed the mark. This article briefly reviews the types of robots and missions used by CRASAR at the WTC site, then discusses the robot-assisted search and rescue effort in terms of lessons for the competition.

Using geographic information systems (GIS) for UAV landings and UGV navigation

Unmanned air and ground platforms are not currently designed to process contextual information (e.g., land use, building types and time of day) to assist in landing and navigation. Instead, a human operator often provides manually-gathered and synthesized contextual input through control commands. This paper describes research that explores the integration of geographic information system (GIS) data with sensor data to enable (1) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to locate safe emergency landing locations without operator intervention, and (2) unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) to incorporate contextual GIS information for navigation. Informal evaluation of the system revealed the potential to impact navigation and emergency landings through the additional contextual information provided.

The AAAI-2002 Robot rescue

The purpose of the AAAI-2002 Robot Rescue event is to challenge researchers to design useful robotic systems for urban search and rescue (USAR). The competition rules are written to simulate a real rescue response in a simulated disaster environment developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art for USAR robotics, an overview of the AAAI-2002 Robot Rescue event, and a discussion of the future of the Robot Rescue event.

A Case Study of How Mobile Robot Competitions Promote Future Research

The purpose of mobile robot competitions is to push the field of research and inspire future work. Our involvement in the Urban Search and Rescue event of the 2000 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition allowed us the opportunity to test our Urban Search and Rescue robot team in a standardized testbed. The result was ideas for future enhancements and research work. This article presents our experience as a case study on how mobile robot competitions promote research.

AAAI/Robocup-2001 robot rescue

The AAAI/RoboCup Robot Rescue event is designed to push researchers to design robotic systems for urban search and rescue. The rules were written to approximate a real rescue situation in a simulated environment constructed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This article discusses the arena, the rules for the 2001 event, the research approaches of the participants, and future challenges.