Posts Tagged: ‘emergency response’

euRathlon – TRADR Summer School, August 22-26, 2016 in Oulu, Finland

22 August, 2016 Posted by tradr_admin

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The ERL Emergency / TRADR summer school on Heterogeneity in Robotics Systems was held at University of Oulu’s facilities in Oulu (Finland) from the 22nd to the 26th August 2016. The summer school was jointly organised by the University of Oulu, the University of the West of England, Bristol, and TRADR EU-FP7 project.

The trend in this area is going towards multi-robot systems with different outfits, processing powers and operation spaces (ground, water, air) that shall be deployed over long periods and several sorties. This raises many challenges, including multi-modal heterogeneous mapping, semantic analysis and reasoning, (collaborative) planning under uncertainty.

The summer school program consisted of lectures on these topics, and hands-on sessions during which the participants work on practical tasks using several robots with different sensory equipment. The intended audience were undergraduate students, Master students, PhD students, postdoc students, researchers from universities/organizations and engineers from industry companies around the world.

To complete the academic program of the summer school, six speakers were invited to give a lecture to the attendees on different topics. As a reaction to the feedback given in the 2015 summer school, the total amount of lectures was lowered to give the students more time for practical exercises.

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TRADR Year 2 Review in Dortmund, Germany

16 March, 2016 Posted by tradr_admin

The TRADR Year 2 review took place in Dortmund (Germany) on Wednesday March 16 and Thursday March 17. On Wednesday the consortium presented its scientific results and on Thursday we demonstrated the integrated system at Phönix Phönix West, an abandoned furnace. The integrated system showcased Y2 work, with emphasis on persistence. The demonstration mission was carried out by a team consisting of a mission commander, a team leader, two UGVs each with an operator and one UAV with an operator and a pilot. One of the UGVs had a camera-equipped arm. The human team members operated remotely from a command truck, except for the UAV pilot in line of sight. The team assessed a part of the building, searched for victims and sources of potentially dangerous materials. The UAV was used for initial overview and subsequent search on the outside, the UGVs explored multilevel terrain inside, partially obstructed by smoke. Main focus was on acquiring and sharing situation awareness among team members across multiple sorties and across team shifts. The robots mapped the environment, provided a video feed and were used to take photos. The human team members were equipped with interfaces presenting them information according to their role(s). Team communication and information about the progress of the mission were collected and accessible in a mission reporting tool. We demonstrated various partial autonomy features designed to facilitate the human operators’ task, including terrain profile estimation from interoceptive sensing, adaptive traversability to automatically control the UGV flippers, a novel free-look control mode for the UGV, virtual bumpers on the UAV. Finally, a mixed-initiative path planning approach and a novel mapping framework designed to support persistence and decrease computational load were also presented. The overall progress of the project was evaluated by the predicate “very good”.
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TRADR team at Exercise Unified Response in London

4 March, 2016 Posted by tradr_admin

Several members of the TRADR team participated as observers at the Exercise Unified Response in London, March 1-4.

It was a large scale training exercise taking place at several sites in and around London, involving about 70 agencies and disaster response teams not only from London Firebrigade, but also international help from Italy, Cyprus and Hungary.  The exercise simulated a building collapse over the Waterloo underground station in central London. The scenario was built in a disused power station in Dartford, Kent.  We got really good insight, especially at the various higher levels, what a response to such a serious incident involves. It was also extremely valuable to see such a complex scenario from close up and see the immense activity of the responders, the higher  levels of tactical and strategic command and many of the other actors involved in the response.Last but not least, there were aspects of the evaluation worth taking inspiration from.

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Introducing TRADR

14 January, 2014 Posted by tradr_admin

TRADR is an integrated research project funded by the EU FP7 Programme, ICT: Cognitive systems, interaction, robotics (Project Nr. 60963).

Using a proven-in-practice user-centric design methodology, TRADR develops novel S&T for human-robot teams to assist in disaster response efforts, over multiple missions: The novel S&T makes experience persistent. Various kinds of robots collaborate with human team members to explore the environment, and gather physical samples. Throughout this collaborative effort, TRADR enables the team to gradually develop its understanding of the disaster area over, multiple possibly asynchronous missions (persistent environment models), to improve team members’ understanding of how to work in the area (persistent multi-robot action models), and to improve team-work (persistent human-robot teaming).