Towards heterogeneous robot teams for disaster mitigation: Results and performance metrics from RoboCup Rescue

Urban Search and Rescue is a growing area of robotic research. The RoboCup Federation has recognized this, and has created the new Virtual Robots competition to complement its existing physical robot and agent competitions. In order to successfully compete in this competition, teams need to field multi-robot solutions that cooperatively explore and map an environment while searching for victims. This paper presents the results of the first annual RoboCup Rescue Virtual competition. It provides details on the metrics used to judge the contestants as well as summaries of the algorithms used by the top four teams. This allows readers to compare and contrast these effective approaches. Further-more, the simulation engine itself is examined and real-world validation results on the engine and algorithms are offered. (C) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.