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Urban Search and Rescue Robot Competitions Arenas

Arenas:

The arenas that will host the competition will be replicas of the NIST Reference Test Arenas for Urban Search and Rescue Robots, and will be fabricated on-site. This year's Red area for advanced mobility will feature new random step fields, which were developed to help assess advanced robot mobility in complex, rubble-like terrains and confined spaces (see Figures below). They use readily available components assembled into easily describable configurations to provide scalable mobility tests for large-size, mid-size (shown), and small-size robots. Variants of these random step fields will likely be proposed as standard test methods for advanced robot mobility in urban search and rescue applications, and this RoboCupRescue event will provide an important opportunity to gain insight into their effectiveness as test artifacts and to refine their design. We've had a wide variety of different robotic implementations attempt to negotiate these obstacles in practice sessions and during competition missions with varying degrees of success. Although the teams generally found them quite challenging for both locomotion and remote perception, robot performance clearly improved with each successive mission. Information on how to build these test artifacts are included in the 2008 arena assembly manual [in pdf]. In this way, the RoboCupRescue Robot League has, and will continue to play a key role in proliferating well-defined test methods that are essential to compare performance and highlight successful approaches for robotic implementations across countries and across continents.

Figure: The RoboCupRescue Robot League Red arena in Osaka, Japan. After the competition, elements of these arenas were distributed among robotics laboratories in Sendai, Yokohama, and Kawasaki, Japan. In 2006, we will do the same in Germany.

Figure: Recently developed random step fields were used within the Red arena to provide well-defined mobility challenges. And as always, simulated victims emitting various signs of life (human form, heat, sound, motion, and/or CO2) provided the incentive for robots to search the arenas in their entirety.

(Click on image to download the RoboCupRescue Robot League Arenas)

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Last updated: February 19, 2008