The yearly TRADR Evaluation exercise (T-Eval) took place end October 2016 in Dortmund, Germany. The location was an old coal-fired power plant `Knepper’ in Dortmund, a large industrial complex which offered multiple stories, obstacles and rubble and allowed for indoor UAV flying.
Together with end-users from the fire department of the city of Dortmund, a number of disaster response exercises were enacted in which the TRADR system was used to provide robotic response.
Mission objectives included scanning of the environment and creation of maps enabling autonomous UGV navigation, multi-robot patrolling and searching for Points of Interest, such as smoke, fire and victims.
In addition, the robotic arm mounted on the UGVs was used to retrieve a chemical sample from the disaster environment. The exercises were successful and will contribute to a further improvement and refinement of the TRADR system in Year 4 of the project.
