Flying and Ground Robot Collaboration for Camera-based Search and Rescue

Search and Rescue (SaR) missions present challenges due to the complexity of the disaster scenarios. Most life losses and injuries occur in developing countries. Robotics has become indispensable for rapidly locating disaster victims. Combining flying and ground robots more effectively serves this purpose due to their complementary features. To...

Development of a model predictive controller for motion planning in a dynamic urban search and rescue environment

A key challenge for SaR robotics is to avoid dynamic obstacles in cluttered environments, with limited and noisy information. In this research, a controller for SaR robots is developed by coupling a local heuristic motion planner with a model predictive control (MPC) based trajectory tracker. Constraint tightening and tube-based control are used...

Learning to search & track dynamic targets with graph representations

Autonomous robots have been widely applied to search and rescue missions for information gathering about target locations. This process needs to be continuously replanned based on new observations in the environment. For dynamic targets, the robot needs to not only discover them but also keep tracking their positions. Previous works focus on...

Hierarchical Integration of Model Predictive and Fuzzy Logic Control for Combined Coverage and Target-Oriented Search-and-Rescue via Robots with Imperfect Sensors

Search-and-rescue (SaR) in unknown environments is a crucial task with life-threatening risks. SaR requires precise, optimal, and fast decisions to be made. Robots are promising candidates expected to execute various SaR tasks autonomously. While humans use heuristics to effectively deal with uncertainties of SaR, optimisation of multiple...

The Influence of Adapting an Agent’s Explanation Style to a Human Team Leader Role on Human-Agent Teamwork during a Simulated Search and Rescue Task

Communication is one of the main challenges in Human-Agent Teams (HATs). An important aspect of communication in HATs is the use of explanation styles. This thesis examines the influence of an explainable agent adapting its explanation style to a supervising human team leader on team performance, trust, situation awareness, collaborative fluency...

Towards Trust in Human-AI Teams

Human-AI teams require trust to operate efficiently and solve certain tasks like search & rescue. Trustworthiness is measured using the ABI model; Ability, Benevolence and Integrity. This research paper tries to observe the effect a conflicting robot has on the human trustworthiness. The hypothesis we try to test is: “human trustworthiness...

Hierarchical Cooperative Mission Planning of Non-Homogeneous Autonomous Search-and-Rescue Robots

The application of autonomous robots in search-and-rescue (SAR) missions forms a challenging field of research. Cooperative search behaviour can greatly increase the efficiency with which a multi-agent system creates situational awareness of and finds victims within an unknown environment. In this research we develop an autonomous mission...

Design patterns for human-AI co-learning: A wizard-of-Oz evaluation in an urban-search-and-rescue task

The rapid advancement of technology empowered by artificial intelligence is believed to intensify the collaboration between humans and AI as team partners. Successful collaboration requires partners to learn about each other and about the task. This human-AI co-learning can be achieved by presenting situations that enable partners to share...

A decision support method for design and operationalization of search and rescue in maritime emergency

Design and operationalization for Search and Rescue (SAR) activities are unstructured and complex multi-criteria decision-making problems, especially for maritime emergency scenario. There is a lack of decision support methods based on intelligent algorithms to shorten the response time and to reduce the loss of life and property. The primary...

TRADR Tactical Display System

This Bachelor Thesis took place as part of the Bachelor Computer Science at Delft University of Technology. This report describes a project issued by the Long-Term Human-Robot Teaming for Robot-Assisted Disaster Response (TRADR) consortium. During this project, the team worked on creating a user interface for use in human-robot teams during...

Trapped-Victim Detection in Post-Disaster Scenarios using Ultra-Wideband Radar

Rescue dogs are commonly used during the urban search-and-rescue (USAR) operations for the initial indication on the presence of trapped victims after the collapse of man-made structures. However, dogs are not able to inform the rescue crews whether the trapped victims are alive or not and where exactly they are located. Other complementary...