Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issue which involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment. The intention of the RoboCupRescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels involving multi-agent team work coordination, physical robotic agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive systems in future. Built upon the success of RoboCup Soccer project, we will provide forums of technical discussions and competitive evaluations for researchers and practitioners. Two projects and leagues, Simulation Project, Robotics and Infrastructure Project, Simulation League and Robot League, are concurrently proceeding at present. Integration of these activities creates digitally-empowered international rescue brigades in the future.

Rules

The goal of the urban search and rescue (USAR) robot competitions is to increase awareness of the challenges involved in search and rescue applications, provide objective evaluation of robotic implementations in representative environments, and promote collaboration between researchers.  It requires robots to demonstrate their capabilities in mobility, sensory perception, planning, mapping, and practical operator interfaces, while searching for simulated victims in unstructured environments.

For more information about USAR robots and the applicable rules please check out
http://robotarenas.nist.gov/rules.htm and http://robotarenas.nist.gov/competitions.htm

Rescue Robot - Official Rules 2007 (pdf)