Workshop at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
September 28, 2004
Sendai, Japan
Urban search and rescue (USAR) aims to develop robots to be used in cooperation with human operators in case of major disasters. Robots are supposed to operate in deeply unstructured environments and provide information about victims and hazards to the operators which will enter the scene later on. USAR robots experienced a tremendous development in the recent years. The introduction of the Real Robot Rescue League has fostered this development even more. The workshop aims to bring together scientists from the Robocup community and not, in order to report on achieved results and to exchange the acquired experiences. The workshop will also give a chance to participants for discussing new challenges and trends in the field. The focus is on practical working implementations rather than on theoretical developments.
The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together both people from the Robocup rescue community and from outside, in order to illustrate their achievements. The idea is to focus on "proved on field results", trying to overcome the view of the competition, and to rather address the broad spectrum of real world applications. Being a field growing so fast, many ideas have been introduced recently and there is the necessity to identify which approaches proved to be successful and can be taken as a reference point for further developments. Moreover, as the reseach evolves, new challenges are identified and need to be brought to the common attention. This is particularly true when robots move from the labs to real world scenarios.
Additionally, the organizers wish to publish an edited volume with the most interesting contributions, to maximize the outreach of the event. This has the twofold advantage to attract high quality submission and to make this event a milestone in the various USAR related workshops. Also, this would lower the entry barriers for those willing to join the community, as an up to date overview of real world result would help them.