TRADR: Long-Term Human-Robot Teaming for Robot-Assisted Disaster Response

Partners of the TRADR project (Long-Term Human-Robot Teaming for Disaster Response) met for a Joint Exercise with end users from the Joint Firebrigade of the Rotterdam harbour region (Gezamenlijke Brandweer; https://www.gezamenlijke-brandweer.nl). After similar events in Italy and in Germany in previous years, this was the first such event in the Netherlands. It took place at a firebrigade training facility on June 26-30 2017. The purpose was to test the TRADR integrated system in a realistic scenario set up by the end users and obtain their feedback on the current system functionalities and usability

The system setup consisted of ground robots and a drone. It was used by a team of firemen who received training on various components of the TRADR system throughout the week, such as UGV control, UAV control, mapping, remote arm operation, adaptive traversability and the use of the TRADR system for tactical information management.

After that the full TRADR system was used in a series of exercises, in which the team had to perform a variety of situation assessment tasks (such as i.e., mapping, searching for victims, fire, smoke and leakage detection) in an environment too dangerous for humans to access, due to danger of explosions and collapsing structures. The functionalities of the integrated system included UGV and UAV operation, map creation, adaptive traversability, realtime gas and smoke detection, tactical information management, team activity reporting and speech processing to extract information about task assignment from human team communication.

The firemen were as always very enthusiastic about the TRADR system and the potential of robot-assisted disaster response in general.

The TRADR team had shown some of this potential during the real deployment in September 2016 in the earthquake-struck Amatrice, Italy (cf. www.tradr-project.eu for more details).