Disaster Robotics Research Project

TRADR: Long-Term Human-Robot Teaming for Disaster Response

TRADR is an integrated european research project funded by the EU FP7 Programme, ICT: Cognitive systems, interaction, robotics (Project Nr. 609763) in the area of robot-assisted disaster response (disaster robotics; robot search and rescue).

Using a proven-in-practice user-centric design methodology, TRADR develops novel science and technology for human-robot teams to assist in urban search and rescue disaster response efforts, which stretch over multiple sorties in missions that may take several days or weeks. The novel technology makes the experience during robot-assisted response to an emergency persistent. Various kinds of robots collaborate with human team members to explore or search the disaster environment, and gather physical samples from the incident site. Throughout this collaborative effort, TRADR enables the team to gradually develop its understanding of the disaster area over multiple, possibly asynchronous sorties (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). TRADR focuses on an industrial accident scenario, but the technology is equally applicable for using robots in other disaster, emergency and urban search and rescue (USAR) scenarios, such as earthquake relief, as the TRADR deployment of robots in Amatrice, Italy, on September 1st 2016 shows.