Towards Highly Reliable Autonomy for Urban Search and Rescue Robots

This paper describes the approach used by Team Hector Darmstadt for participation in the 2015 RoboCup Rescue League competition. Participating in the RoboCup Rescue competition since 2009, the members of Team Hector Darmstadt focus on exploration of disaster sites using autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs). The team has been established as part of a PhD program funded by the German Research Foundation at TU Darmstadt and combines expertise from Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering. We give an overview of the complete system used to solve the problem of reliably finding victims in harsh USAR environments. This includes hardware as well as software solutions and diverse topics like locomotion, SLAM, pose estimation, human robot interaction and victim detection. In 2015, the team focuses on improving the rough terrain motion capabilities of used platforms as well as manipulation capabilities. As a contribution to the RoboCup Rescue community, major parts of the used software have been released and documented as open source software for ROS