Development of a search and rescue field robotic assistant

The work introduced in this paper was performed as part of the FP7 INTRO (Marie-Curie ITN) project. We describe the activities undertaken towards the development of a field robotic assistant for a Search and Rescue application. We specifically target a rubble clearing task, where the robot will ferry small pieces of rubble between two waypoints assigned to it by the human. The aim is to complement a human worker with a robotic assistant for this task, while maintaining a comparable level of speed and efficiency in the task execution. Towards this end we develop/integrate software capabilities in mobile navigation, arm manipulation and high level tasks sequences learning. Early outdoor experiments carried out in a quarry are furthermore introduced.