Field report: Civil protection exercise gas storage

There is a lot potential for mobile robots supporting responders mitigating various kinds of disasters ranging from manmade accidents with hazard materials to natural earthquakes with collapsed buildings. Although, there are many examples of application of robots in research and disasters response exercises examples in real missions are rare. Reasons for that are that the deployment of robot systems is not trivial and that many systems are yet not robust and stable enough. Therefore, actually there are basically no disasters response teams that possess and deploy robots in the field. As a consequence currently robot systems come from external institutions like universities or companies and are operated by external experts. Such requests for external support for disaster relief are already common. For instance see the example in [1] using the European Civil Protection Mechanism (EUCP). As this situation has to be accepted until robots will be really easy to use and stable procedures that allow to deal with this setup have to be found. A crucial factor for the acceptance of such setups by the responder is the easy integration of the robots and the external experts in the mission. In this paper we present the results of an emergency response exercise (a fire in a gas storage) where particularly care about these factors was taken. In the remainder of the paper we will motivate and discuss the team structure we used for the external robot team and present the outline and the results of the exercise. We will conclude the paper with some lessons learned during the exercise.