The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets: A Marsupial Team for Urban Search and Rescue

©2002. American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The original publication is available at: www.aaai.orgPresented at the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Workshop (AAAI-02), 28 July-1 August 2002 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.We describe our entry in the AAAI 2002 Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) competition, a marsupial team consisting of a larger wheeled robot and several small legged robots, carried around by the larger robot. This setup exploits complimentary strengths of each robot type in a challenging domain. We describe both the hardware and software architecture, and the on-board real-time mapping which forms the basis of accurate victim-localization crucial to the USAR domain. We also evaluate what challenges remain to be resolved in order to deploy search and rescue robots in realistic scenarios