Blue Swarm Sentinel and Blue Swarm 2

This paper describes the Utah State University (USU) entry in the 2002 robotic Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) competition, hosted by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). More importantly, it also describes the problems the team encountered in preparing for this year’s competition, the lessons learned, and plans for the 2003 USAR competition. Description of the 2002 Entry The USU entry for this year’s USAR competition combined last year’s entry (the Blue Swarm 2) with a coordinator robot (the Blue Swarm Sentinel). The concept was to have the Sentinel coordinate with the six robots making up the Blue Swarm 2 and relay pertinent information (especially the location of victims) back to a human rescuer viewing a PC-based graphical user interface (GUI) via a radio frequency (RF) transceiver. The team ran into some problems implementing this concept, as will be described in the problems encountered section of this paper. This section will describe the USU entry as it was intended to operate