Findings from NSF-JST-NIST Workshop on Rescue Robotics

This paper summarizes the findings and observations from the NSF-JST-NIST Workshop on Rescue Robotics held at Texas A&M, March 8-11, 2010. The 50 workshop participants represented sixteen universities in the USA, Japan, and China. Over a dozen land, marine, and aerial vehicles were tested using the Response Robot Evaluation Exercise #6 or in more scenario-oriented testing at Disaster City®. The workshop produced nine recommendations for standards for unmanned vehicles as well as proposed four topics for human-robot interaction evaluation. While the workshop generated tangible contributions to the ASTM Standards meeting and individual research programs, the workshop illustrated the benefits of interacting with more responders, robots, and other researchers than has been previously available to the community.