-In May 2012, two major earthquakes occurred in the Emilia-Romagna region, Northern Italy, followed by further aftershocks and earthquakes in June 2012. This sequence of earthquakes and shocks caused multiple casualties, and widespread damage to numerous historical buildings in the region. The Italian National Fire Corps deployed disaster response and recovery of people and buildings. In June 2012, they requested the aid of the EU-funded project NIFTi, to assess damage to historical buildings, and cultural artifacts located therein. To this end, NIFTi deployed a team of humans and robots (UGV, UAV) in the red-area of Mirandola, EmiliaRomagna, from Tuesday July 24 until Friday July 27, 2012. The team worked closely together with the members of the Italian National Fire Corps involved in the red area. This paper describes the deployment, and experience.

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 a field report and summarizes the problems of the appliance of rescue robots during the Collapse of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne. Two robots where on the field, ready to be applied: A shoe-box size tracked mobile robot (VGTV Xtreme) and a caterpillar like system (Active Scope Camera). Due to the special type of collapse and design limitations of the robots, both robotic systems could not be applied. Either they could not reach voids or did not fit into, or could not be controlled from a safe distance. The faced problems have been analyzed and are described in this paper.

In the paper we present performance reviews of some of the most popular range sensors in robotics under smoky conditions. The experiments were conducted in the same environment with the same source of smoke of different densities. The range sensors were setup to produce 3D point clouds. To evaluate the performance of the sensors two metrics were used: the total number of valid points produced by the 3D sensors and the number of points which could be extracted as fitting to a planar surface, both in respect to the smoke density

Abstract-This paper introduces our robotic system named UGAV (Unmanned Ground-Air Vehicle) consisting of two semi-autonomous robot platforms, an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The paper focuses on three topics of the inspection with the combined UGV and UAV: (A) teleoperated control by means of cell or smart phones with a new concept of automatic configuration of the smart phone based on a RKI-XML description of the vehicles control capabilities, (B) the camera and vision system with the focus to real time feature extraction e.g. for the tracking of the UAV and (C) the architecture and hardware of the UAV.