Category: News

The Response Robotics Summer School 2013 – Registrations Open!

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION – REGISTRATIONS OPEN!

The Response Robotics Summer School (RRSS) is a hands-on summer school on the challenges and Best-in-Class solutions for Response Robotics, with a focus on the challenges posed by Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) and remote handling for response applications.

This event is a collaboration between the Curtin University of Technology Department of Computing, the Western Australia Police Bomb Response Unit, the DHS-NIST-ASTM International Standard Test Methods for Response Robots development effort, the RoboCup Federation through the RoboCupRescue Robot League, and Robolit LLC. It is run in conjunction with the Bomb Response Technology Seminar (BRTS), an event for EOD responders and equipment manufacturers from around Australia, the region, and the world.

The event is primarily aimed at PhD and masters students, final year undergraduate project students and early career researchers. We welcome participants from both within and outside the RoboCupRescue Robot League community, as well as participants from Australia and abroad. We particularly welcome participants who are interested in and/or intending to participate in the RoboCupRescue Robot League competitions.

We also welcome representatives of industry and government, including manufacturers, research companies and other organisations that wish to participate within the framework of the academic and responder programs and/or who wish to share and demonstrate their capabilities during the exercises and take advantage of the DHS-NIST-ASTM International Standard Test Methods for Response Robots. Likewise, we welcome interested members of the community who are working on solving these challenges outside of academic and industrial research settings.

This intensive five-day summer school is the latest in a long line of summer schools and teaching camps that started with the original Rescue Robotics Camp in Rome in 2004 and most continued most recently with the IEEE-RAS Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics Summer School 2012 in Alanya, Turkey. It is an outreach activity of the DHS-NIST-ASTM International Standard Test Methods for Response Robots program and has been established by members of the SSRR research community, including members of the Organising Committee of the International RoboCupRescue Robot League, to better address the rapidly growing need for effective robotic solutions in emergency response scenarios.

We encourage participants to bring their prototypical implementations of solutions to challenges within this domain. There will be opportunities to demonstrate these solutions both to other participants as well as to responders, and to evaluate and compare these solutions to those currently in deployment within the framework of the DHS-NIST-ASTM International Standard Test Methods for Response Robots.

Please visit the website at http://www.responserobotics.org/ or send email to info@responserobotics.org if you have any further questions or if you would like to be added to the low volume Response Robotics Summer School announcements mailing list.

DATES and REGISTRATION:

The summer school runs from Monday the 9th to Friday the 13th of September, 2013.

Registrations are now open! Attendees should visit the website, http://www.responserobotics.org/, for registration details. Registration prices increase in August and close at the end of August. Admission to the summer school is competitive and decided by the Organising Committee. Please see the website for registration instructions and further details.

Due to the nature of the facilities at which this event will be held, all participants must be registered in advance. There will be no on-site registrations available.

This event is capacity limited so we encourage participants to register early!

REGISTRATION FEE WAIVERS:

Attendees are encouraged to bring highly relevant, working implementations of their research to demonstrate to the attendees of the RRSS and BRTS, within the DHS-NIST-ASTM International Standard Test Methods for Response Robots. Demonstrations sought include, but are not limited to, novel sensing, artificial intelligence, mobility, manipulation, mechanisms and user interfaces, that address gaps in current response robot capabilities. A small number of registration fee waivers will be granted to students and researchers from academic institutions who bring such demonstrations, eligibility for which will be decided by the Organising Committee. Please contact us at info@responserobotics.org to discuss eligibility and arrangements for the demonstration. Applications for these waivers will close on the 9th of August.

Attendees from non-academic sectors are also encouraged to bring demonstrations of highly relevant technologies. Please contact us to make arrangements.

STRUCTURE:

The event will open on Monday and Tuesday with academic presentations focusing on the research challenges and current developments in response robotics. Participants will gain a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in crucial areas of research and deployed capabilities, as well as the experiences and needs of the end users.

Participants of the RRSS will join attendees of the BRTS on Wednesday for joint seminars on topics of common interest, followed by preparations for the practical sessions.

The event will continue on Thursday and Friday with joint practical exercises. Participants of the RRSS will work alongside attendees of the BRTS, deploying both commercial and prototypical robotic solutions within the DHS-NIST-ASTM International Standard Test Method for Response Robots apparatuses and operational scenarios at the Western Australia Police Bomb Response Unit’s training and test facilities. Through these joint exercises, participants will be able to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges of the field, identify gaps for further research, test and refine their prototypical implementations, and share their developments with the wider research and responder community.

Please visit http://www.responserobotics.org/ for the latest information on topics and speakers.

VENUE AND TRAVEL:

The lecture component of this event will be held at the Western Australia Police Bomb Response Unit facility in Maylands and the practical exercises will be conducted at the Police Training Facility in Gosnells, both close to Perth in Western Australia. Perth International Airport may be easily reached with regular direct services from many hubs within Oceania, Asia and the Middle East, and via scheduled connecting flights from elsewhere.

Further information about ground transportation and hotel arrangements will be made available shortly so please consult the website closer to the registration date and/or subscribe to the mailing list for updated information.

OTHER EVENTS:

The RRSS is one of a set of inter-related summer schools, teaching camps, conferences, competitions and evaluation exercises, held around the world throughout the year, that aim to focus research efforts into Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics. Participants with a particular interest in 3D mapping, path planning and software architectures, as applied to this domain, are invited to also consider the Rescue Robotics Camp 2013, co-located with the IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR 2013), to be held in Linkoping, Sweden, from the 21st to the 23rd of October.

Please see the website for a list of other events.

ORGANISERS:

General Chair:
– Raymond Sheh, US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Robolit LLC, Department of Computing at Curtin University of Technology (from September 2013)

Co-Chairs:
– Bill Collidge, Western Australia Police Bomb Response Unit
– Haldun Komsuoglu, Robolit LLC
– Mihai Lazarescu, Department of Computing at Curtin University of Technology

Advisory Committee:
– Adam Jacoff, NIST

We look forward to seeing you in Perth!

—
Dr. Raymond Sheh

raymond.sheh@robolit.com

Associate
Intelligent Systems Division, Engineering Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
100 Bureau Drive, Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8230, USA

Research Scientist
Robolit LLC
1829 Pine Street, Suite 404, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA

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Cheetah-Cub: A Robot That Runs Like a Cat

Developed by EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory (Biorob) this little robot is built to be able to run very quickly, nearly seven times its body length in one second even over small steps. Robots developed from this concept could eventually be used in search and rescue missions or for exploration.
Read a full article at Science Daily or Phy.org.

Law Enforcement, First Responder, Border Patrol ground robot market

WinterGreen Research announces a new study that is looking at robots used by Law Enforcement, First Responder, Border Patrol. As the US military pulls out of Iraq and Afghanistan, they have many robots built to help soldiers. The question is how can these robots be used now, and were they effeicntive. Many Law Enforcement, First Responder, Border Patrol are starting to look into using robots to help with their actions, and to help keep their units safe in dangerous situations.
Read the full article at Military Aerospace .

DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge: OSRF Gets Simulator Ready

DARPA have created two qualifying events in which teams from around the world have been submitting entries to the VRC, in order to earn a place in the VRC itself. There are 26 teams in Track B (funded) as well as Track C (unfunded). The next step is for these teams is to complete in the VRC, which will be three increasing difficult simulation environments that the robot complete different tasks. The video on the sight lets you see the qualifying events, and the possible VRC events.
The full article is at IEEE Spectrum .

Drone Adventures Uses UAVs to Help Make the World a Better Place

Drone Adventures was founded earlier this year to find ways of “promoting the great potential of drones in civilian applications, focusing on conservation, humanitarian, cultural and search and rescue domains.” Drones are built to help us, and these guys are trying to find ways to do this, they just returned from a trip to help map Haiti.
Here is a link to the full article at IEEE Spectrum .

Washington state bridge collapsed when a truck’s cargo seemed to hit a support girder

An 18-wheeler carrying an oversize load struck part of the Interstate 5 bridge over Washington’s Skagit River. This hit caused to pavement to give way, causing two other vehicles to plunge into the water. Only one of the three people involved remained hospitalized Friday. That lady was in stable condition, according to Skagit Valley Hospital.
Here is a link to the full article at CNN .

UAVs and the Moore Tornado: response to CNN blog

CNN has a nice blog post on the UAVs that weren’t used at Moore.  Here are my comments:

Small UAVs have been used at 11 disasters internationally. The first use of small UAVs was in the US by the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, which I direct, during Hurricane Katrina as part of the Florida State Emergency Response Team. We have been advising on the use and procedures for getting permissions for the tornado response, as flying even a small UAV requires coordination with the other activity- hence the no fly zone. The FAA has had an emergency COA process for years, though we find many agencies and industries are not aware of it. We are happy to assist agencies and industries in adopting and deploying unmanned systems of any kind.

OKC Tornado– unmanned systems not the best fit, here’s why

Our hearts go out to the victims and the responders in Oklahoma. We have been working with the FEMA Innovation Team from shortly after the devastation occurred, however aerial and ground unmanned systems are not a good fit for this situation.

In terms of UAVs: There’s already aerial coverage from manned assets and it does not appear that multistory commercial buildings are heavily damaged. Two-story houses and apartment buildings and “strip malls” are well understood failures so additional aerial views are generally not needed to provide more information. If UAVs were available to the first responders, then they would be a much less expensive source of aerial information than manned helicopters or exploiting news helicopters. UAVs provide the ability to serve as wireless nodes (indeed, a big shout out to Roboticists Without Borders member Black Swift Technologies for their work with that) but the coordination with air traffic control and manned assets plus the deployment of COWs (cellular towers on wheels) means that if there weren’t available immediately, they are less likely to be of benefit.
In terms of UGVs: This is a wide affected area with “shallow” debris versus a big building collapse. Canines are the quickest way to locate any survivors that aren’t shouting or aren’t on the surface of the debris. You don’t need the UGV to penetrate the debris further than what a search camera can go to help find survivors or speed extrication.
In terms of UMVs: If there are lakes and streams, marine vehicles might be useful in searching for missing person who may have been swept into a pond and drowned.
We continue to stand by to provide assistance as needed.

Shrewbot Uses Whiskers to Map Its Environment

A new robot was shown off at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) called the Shrewbot, which is modeled after the Etruscan pygmy shrew. This robot uses its whiskers to map the objects in an area, and does not use any other senors. This research could have robot that go into area with low viability and still be able to map and understand the environment it is working in.
Here is the full aritcle at IEEE Spectrum.