RoboCupRescue project

This paper presents current state of RoboCupRescue International Cooperative Research Project. It consists of a Simulation Project and Robot Project. The Simulation Project developed a version 0 simulator that consists of 4 disaster simulators, various autonomous agents of disaster response, a geographic information system, 3 simulation viewers and a distributed simulation kernel. Key points of this system from the viewpoint of disaster science is: (1) synthetic simulation of heterogeneous phenomena and behaviors, and (2) simulation of response behaviors including human organization. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this simulation and are being applied to the local government. Robot Project started a contest. The field where robots are tested is developed by NIST to simulate real disaster situations. The evaluation rule considers accuracy and efficiency of search and surveillance of victims in the confined space of structures. Participants deployed for real operations at the New York World Trade Center terror, and found about 10 victim bodies. A network-based new urban infrastructure is proposed. It consists of robotic systems and IT devices. They are integrated by the distributed architecture.