The effect of morphology of a legged robot on traversing rough terrain

When a disaster strikes a human-engineered environment, it can be difficult and dangerous for rescue workers to search for survivors. Collapsed buildings, fire and other hazards can make specific areas too dangerous to send in a human or dog. In this case, urban search and rescue (USAR) robots can be useful. Various researches have been...

Comparing performance and situation awareness in USAR unit tasks in a virtual and real environment

A convenient way to test Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) robots would be in virtual environments (VEs). Evaluations in VEs are generally accepted as alternative for real scenarios. There are obvious differences between operation in a real and virtual environment. Nonetheless, the current experiment showed no significant differences in situation...

Revealing unexpected effects of rescue robots’ team-membership in a virtual environment

In urban search and rescue (USAR) situations resources are limited and workload is high. Robots that act as team players instead of tools could help in these situations. A Virtual Reality (VR) experiment was set up to test if team performance of a human-robot team increases when the robot act as such a team player. Three robot settings were...

ePartners for Dynamic Task Allocation and Coordination

This dissertation promotes a focus shift from automation extending human capabilities to automation partnering with the human. Highly automated systems tend to be incompatible with humans, leading to degradations in performance that may lead to serious problems in high-risk professional domains, such as the Navy and Urban Search and Rescue. This...

BSC-project USAR: Search and rescue Awareness and Information Tool (SAInT)

The Search and rescue Awareness Information Tool (SAInT) project is part of a larger project called "Collaboration at a Distance", a joint effort between the Delft University of Technology and TNO Defence, Security and Safety. The goal of this project is to identify and create tools to improve the communication over distances for the USAR.nl...

RubbleViewer: Communicating for situation awareness in the urban search and rescue domain

The current way of communicating situation awareness through sketches has been found not sufficient as is seen during exercises of usar.nl. The proposed solution RubbleViewer presents the personnel with a 3d map where they can annotate information on. This map of a collapsed building is calculated by running photogrammetric algorithms on an...