The paper describes experience with applying a user-centric design methodology in developing systems for human-robot teaming in Urban Search and Rescue. A human-robot team consists of several semi-autonomous robots (rovers/UGVs, microcopter/UAVs), several humans at an off-site command post (mission commander, UGV operators) and one on-site human (UAV operator). This system has been developed in close cooperation with several rescue organizations, and has been deployed in a real-life tunnel accident use case. The human-robot team jointly explores an accident site, communicating using a multi-modal team interface, and spoken dialogue. The paper describes the development of this complex socio-technical system per se, as well as recent experience in evaluating the performance of this system

This paper describes our experience in designing, developing and deploying systems for supporting human-robot teams during disaster response. It is based on R&D performed in the EU-funded project NIFTi. NIFTi aimed at building intelligent, collaborative robots that could work together with humans in exploring a disaster site, to make a situational assessment. To achieve this aim, NIFTi addressed key scientific design aspects in building up situation awareness in a human-robot team, developing systems using a user-centric methodology involving end users throughout the entire R&D cycle, and regularly deploying implemented systems under real-life circumstances for experimentation and testing. This has yielded substantial scientific advances in the state-of-the-art in robot mapping, robot autonomy for operating in harsh terrain, collaborative planning, and human-robot interaction. NIFTi deployed its system in actual disaster response activities in Northern Italy, in July 2012, aiding in structure damage assessment.

This paper presents evaluation of four different state estimation architectures exploiting the extended Kalman filter (EKF) for 6-DOF dead reckoning of a mobile robot. The EKF is a well proven and commonly used technique for fusion of inertial data and robot's odometry. However, different approaches to designing the architecture of the state estimator lead to different performance and computational demands. While seeking the best possible solution for the mobile robot, the nonlinear model and the error model are addressed, both with and without a complementary filter for attitude estimation. The performance is determined experimentally by means of precision of both indoor and outdoor navigation, including complex-structured environment such as stairs and rough terrain. According to the evaluation, the nonlinear model combined with the complementary filter is selected as a best candidate (reaching 0.8 m RMSE and average of 4% return position error (RPE) of distance driven) and implemented for real-time onboard processing during a rescue mission deployment. Index Terms-Complementary filter (CF), extended Kalman filter (EKF), urban search and rescue (USAR).

Urban search and rescue (USAR) missions for mobile robots require reliable state estimation systems resilient to conditions given by the dynamically changing environment. We design and evaluate a data fusion system for localization of a mobile skid‐steer robot intended for USAR missions. We exploit a rich sensor suite including both proprioceptive (inertial measurement unit and tracks odometry) and exteroceptive sensors (omnidirectional camera and rotating laser rangefinder). To cope with the specificities of each sensing modality (such as significantly differing sampling frequencies), we introduce a novel fusion scheme based on an extended Kalman filter for six degree of freedom orientation and position estimation. We demonstrate the performance on field tests of more than 4.4  km driven under standard USAR conditions. Part of our datasets include ground truth positioning, indoor with a Vicon motion capture system and outdoor with a Leica theodolite tracker. The overall median accuracy of localization—achieved by combining all four modalities—was 1.2% and 1.4% of the total distance traveled for indoor and outdoor environments, respectively. To identify the true limits of the proposed data fusion, we propose and employ a novel experimental evaluation procedure based on failure case scenarios. In this way, we address the common issues such as slippage, reduced camera field of view, and limited laser rangefinder range, together with moving obstacles spoiling the metric map. We believe such a characterization of the failure cases is a first step toward identifying the behavior of state estimation under such conditions. We release all our datasets to the robotics community for possible benchmarking.

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In this paper we introduce the concept of Adaptive Traversability (AT), which we define as means of autonomous motion control adapting the robot morphology-configuration of articulated parts and their compliance-to traverse unknown complex terrain with obstacles in an optimal way. We verify this concept by proposing a reinforcement learning based AT algorithm for mobile robots operating in such conditions. We demonstrate the functionality by training the AT algorithm under lab conditions on simple EUR-pallet obstacles and then testing it successfully on natural obstacles in a forest. For quantitative evaluation we define a metrics based on comparison with expert operator. Exploiting the proposed AT algorithm significantly decreases the cognitive load of the operator.