Related papers: Analysis of Interior Rubble Void Spaces at Champla…
On June 24, 2021, a 12-story condominium building (Champlain Towers South) in Surfside, Florida partially collapsed, resulting in one of the deadliest building collapses in United States history with 98 people confirmed deceased. In this…
Despite well-reported instances of robots being used in disaster response, there is scant published data on the internal composition of the void spaces within structural collapse incidents. Data collected during these incidents is mired in…
Rapid response to natural disasters such as earthquakes is a crucial element in ensuring the safety of civil infrastructures and minimizing casualties. Traditional manual inspection is labour-intensive, time-consuming, and can be dangerous…
Soft, growing vine robots are well-suited for exploring cluttered, unknown environments, and are theorized to be performant during structural collapse incidents caused by earthquakes, fires, explosions, and material flaws. These vine robots…
This work proposes an autonomous multi-robot exploration pipeline that coordinates the behaviors of robots in an indoor environment composed of multiple rooms. Contrary to simple frontier-based exploration approaches, we aim to enable…
Many complex vehicular systems, such as large marine vessels, contain confined spaces like water tanks, which are critical for the safe functioning of the vehicles. It is particularly hazardous for humans to inspect such spaces due to…
This technical report is about the mission and the experience gained during the reconnaissance of an industrial hall with hazardous substances after a major fire in Berlin. During this operation, only UAVs and cameras were used to obtain…
One of the most important features of mobile rescue robots is the ability to autonomously detect casualties, i.e. human bodies, which are usually lying on the ground. This paper proposes a novel method for autonomously detecting casualties…
In this work, we estimate the depth in which domestic waste are located in space from a mobile robot in outdoor scenarios. As we are doing this calculus on a broad range of space (0.3 - 6.0 m), we use RGB-D camera and LiDAR fusion. With…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with bioradars are a life-saving technology that can enable identification of survivors under collapsed buildings in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes or gas explosions. However,…
Collapsing of structural buildings has been sighted commonly and the presence of potential faults has proved to be damaging to the buildings, resulting in accidents. It is essential to continuously monitor any building for faults where…
Earthquakes, fire, and floods often cause structural collapses of buildings. The inspection of damaged buildings poses a high risk for emergency forces or is even impossible, though. We present three recent selected missions of the Robotics…
Natural disasters pose significant challenges to timely and accurate damage assessment due to their sudden onset and the extensive areas they affect. Traditional assessment methods are often labor-intensive, costly, and hazardous to…
Monitoring dam failures using satellite images provides first responders with efficient management of early interventions. It is also equally important to monitor spatial and temporal changes in the inundation area to track the…
Inspired by human behavior when traveling over unknown terrain, this study proposes the use of probing strategies and integrates them into a traversability analysis framework to address safe navigation on unknown rough terrain. Our…
This paper deals with the problem of detecting fallen people lying on the floor by means of a mobile robot equipped with a 3D depth sensor. In the proposed algorithm, inspired by semantic segmentation techniques, the 3D scene is…
The space environment around the Earth is populated by more than 130 million objects of 1 mm in size and larger, and future predictions shows that this amount is destined to increase, even if mitigation measures are implemented at a far…
Robots with internal visual self-models promise unprecedented adaptability, yet existing autonomous modeling pipelines remain fragile under realistic sensing conditions such as noisy imagery and cluttered backgrounds. This paper presents…
As mobile service robots increasingly coexist with pedestrians, ensuring passively safe behaviour during confined emergency evacuations is critical. Existing multi-robot yielding strategies often focus solely on collision avoidance and…
The large number and scale of natural and man-made disasters have led to an urgent demand for technologies that enhance the safety and efficiency of search and rescue teams. Semi-autonomous rescue robots are beneficial, especially when…