Search and Rescue Robots: The Civil Protection Teams of the Future

After an earthquake or the collapse of a built structure, and facing a scenario of large destruction, the response time to search and locate trapped survivors is crucial. The human intervention of urban search and rescue (USAR) teams, including USAR dogs, has to be done cautiously so as to protect the rescue workers from further collapses. Debris may be so cluttered that prevent the close human access to the victims. Also, potential risk of further landslide requires the propping of the structures before human intervention. Rescue preparation operations may be time consuming, and a fast action to locate survivors and to take them human voices, light and/or water is a crucial factor for life. Therefore, there is the clear need for search and rescue robots that can be released immediately after a disaster in which the conditions are too dangerous and too cluttered for people and dogs to begin searching for victims. Teams of such robots should desirably be heterogeneous (e.g., aerial robots to perform scenario reconnaissance, powerful land robots to remove debris, small agile land robots to reach survivors buried under the debris), be able to perform with a given level of adjustable autonomy (as the presence of humans in the team to take crucial decisions will always be required) and be easy-to-learn and simple to launch and friendly to operate. In this paper we refer to some of the achievements in the area of USAR robots worldwide, and then focus on R&D work towards increasing the autonomy of USAR robots that has been done over the past 10 years at the Institute for Systems and Robotics of the Instituto Superior Te 'cnico, TU Lisbon, in collaboration with Portuguese companies and Civil Protection institutions, including a land tracked wheel robot and aerial robots of different types (blimp, quad copters).