Robot-Dog - Human Interaction in Urban Search and Rescue Scenarios: Improving the Efficiency of Rescue Teams in Hazardous Environments

摘要

After a natural urban disaster the interior of the rubble is often where the majority of victims are located. Mortality rates increases and peaks after 48 hours, so it is of major importance to have fast and effective search and rescue teams. Nowadays, the rescue and exploration teams normally use dogs as a companion to find victims. Trained dogs are very helpful in these situations since their high mobility, speed and detection capacity. However they need constant instructions and supervision, they can be in danger in some situations and they are not able to collect precise data from the environment. Instead of trying to build competing devices, the COMPANIONS project looks at cooperation between natural and artificial creatures and in particular robots and dogs. This is rather new ground for research, where all the dog shortcomings can be complemented with autonomous robots with cognitive abilities able to cooperate with dogs and humans in search and rescue environments. The aim of the project is to analyse how a team of agents (robots-dogs-humans in this case) can cooperate and interact during search and rescue. Research will be towards a new rescue scenario composed that will allow: (i) to empower the best characteristics of all the involved agents and to minimize the worst ones; (ii) provide the fundamental tools for enabling these three agents to work in a cooperative and efficient way in rescue missions; and (iii) and to lengthen the human-dog link by allowing the exploration combining mobile robots and trained dogs with more distant and safer human intervention in the dangerous rescue scenes. The main challenge will be the dog-robot interaction: to give visual cognitive and reasoning abilities to the robot in order to let him autonomously interact and cooperate with the dog according its behaviour and the environment conditions; and to specifically train a dog to correctly accept and interact the robot (in charge of an expert dog training company).