{"title":"Formulation and Solution of the Multi-agent Concurrent Search and Rescue Problem","authors":"Martin Pallin, Jayedur Rashid, Petter Ögren","doi":"10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597685","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we formulate and solve the concurrent multi-agent search and rescue problem (C-SARP), where a multi-agent system is to concurrently search an area and assist the victims found during the search. It is widely believed that a UAV-system can help saving lives by locating and assisting victims over large inaccessible areas in the initial stages after a disaster, such as an earthquake, flood, or plane crash. In such a scenario, a natural objective is to minimize the loss of lives. Therefore, two types of uncertainties needs to be taken into account, the uncertainty in position of the victims, and the uncertainty in health over time. It is rational to start looking where victims are most likely to be found, such as the reported position of a victim in a life boat with access to a radio, but it is also rational to start looking where loss of lives is most likely to occur, such as the uncertain position of victims swimming in cold water. We show that the proposed C-SARP is NP-hard, and that the two elements of search and rescue should not be decoupled, making C-SARP substantially different from previously studied multi agent problems, including coverage, multi agent travelling salesmen problems and earlier studies of decoupled search and rescue. Finally, we provide an experimental comparison between the most promising algorithms used in the literature to address similar problems, and find that the solutions to the C-SARP reproduce the trajectories recommended in search and rescue manuals for simple problems, but outperform those trajectories in terms of expected survivability for more complex scenarios.","PeriodicalId":423263,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127301649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fidel González, R. Caballero, F. J. Pérez-Grau, A. Viguria
{"title":"Vision-based UAV Detection for Air-to-Air Neutralization","authors":"Fidel González, R. Caballero, F. J. Pérez-Grau, A. Viguria","doi":"10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597861","url":null,"abstract":"The widespread availability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) poses potential threats for people and properties on the ground, and other airspace users. This work introduces the design, development and validation of a UAV neutralization system that is based on another UAV with a capture device. The operation is fully autonomous, and only relies on data captured by two cameras onboard the captor UAV: one for long-range detections up to 40m, and another one for short-range accurate estimations prior to the actual capture. The approach has been extensively validated in field experiments, proving robustness and computational efficiency.","PeriodicalId":423263,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115222166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
L. Battistuzzi, Lucrezia Grassi, C. Recchiuto, A. Sgorbissa
{"title":"Towards Ethics Training in Disaster Robotics: Design and Usability Testing of a Text-Based Simulation","authors":"L. Battistuzzi, Lucrezia Grassi, C. Recchiuto, A. Sgorbissa","doi":"10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597686","url":null,"abstract":"Rescue robots are expected to soon become commonplace at disaster sites, where they are increasingly being deployed to provide rescuers with improved access and intervention capabilities while mitigating risks. The presence of robots in operation areas, however, is likely to carry a layer of additional ethical complexity to situations that are already ethically challenging. In addition, limited guidance is available for ethically informed, practical decision-making in real-life disaster settings, and specific ethics training programs are lacking. The contribution of this paper is thus to propose a tool aimed at supporting ethics training for rescuers operating with rescue robots. To this end, we have designed an interactive text-based simulation. The simulation was developed in Python, using Tkinter, Python's de-facto standard GUI. It is designed in accordance with the Case-Based Learning approach, a widely used instructional method that has been found to work well for ethics training. The simulation revolves around a case grounded in ethical themes we identified in previous work on ethical issues in rescue robotics: fairness and discrimination, false or excessive expectations, labor replacement, safety, and trust. Here we present the design of the simulation and the results of usability testing.","PeriodicalId":423263,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116996807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neural Network Based Lidar Gesture Recognition for Realtime Robot Teleoperation","authors":"Simón Chamorro, J. Collier, François Grondin","doi":"10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597855","url":null,"abstract":"We propose a novel low-complexity lidar gesture recognition system for mobile robot control robust to gesture variation. Our system uses a modular approach, consisting of a pose estimation module and a gesture classifier. Pose estimates are predicted from lidar scans using a Convolutional Neural Network trained using an existing stereo-based pose estimation system. Gesture classification is accomplished using a Long Short-Term Memory network and uses a sequence of estimated body poses as input to predict a gesture. Breaking down the pipeline into two modules reduces the dimensionality of the input, which could be lidar scans, stereo imagery, or any other modality from which body keypoints can be extracted, making our system lightweight and suitable for mobile robot control with limited computing power. The use of lidar contributes to the robustness of the system, allowing it to operate in most outdoor conditions, to be independent of lighting conditions, and for input to be detected 360 degrees around the robot. The lidar-based pose estimator and gesture classifier use data augmentation and automated labeling techniques, requiring a minimal amount of data collection and avoiding the need for manual labeling. We report experimental results for each module of our system and demonstrate its effectiveness by testing it in a real-world robot teleoperation setting.","PeriodicalId":423263,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115894960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Elijah S. Lee, Daigo Shishika, Giuseppe Loianno, Vijay R. Kumar
{"title":"Defending a Perimeter from a Ground Intruder Using an Aerial Defender: Theory and Practice","authors":"Elijah S. Lee, Daigo Shishika, Giuseppe Loianno, Vijay R. Kumar","doi":"10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597859","url":null,"abstract":"The perimeter defense game has received interest in recent years as a variant of the pursuit-evasion game. A number of previous works have solved this game to obtain the optimal strategies for defender and intruder, but the derived theory considers the players as point particles with first-order assumptions. In this work, we aim to apply the theory derived from the perimeter defense problem to robots with realistic models of actuation and sensing and observe performance discrepancy in relaxing the first-order assumptions. In particular, we focus on the hemisphere perimeter defense problem where a ground intruder tries to reach the base of a hemisphere while an aerial defender constrained to move on the hemisphere aims to capture the intruder. The transition from theory to practice is detailed, and the designed system is simulated in Gazebo. Two metrics for parametric analysis and comparative study are proposed to evaluate the performance discrepancy.","PeriodicalId":423263,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115585769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trust-Aware Emergency Response for A Resilient Human-Swarm Cooperative System","authors":"Yijiang Pang, Rui Liu","doi":"10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/SSRR53300.2021.9597682","url":null,"abstract":"A human-swarm cooperative system, which mixes multiple robots and a human supervisor to form a mission team, has been widely used for emergent scenarios such as criminal tracking and victim assistance. These scenarios are related to human safety and require a robot team to quickly transit from the current undergoing task into the new emergent task. This sudden mission change brings difficulty in robot motion adjustment and increases the risk of performance degradation of the swarm. Trust in human-human collaboration reflects a general expectation of the collaboration; based on the trust humans mutually adjust their behaviors for better teamwork. Inspired by this, in this research, a trust-aware reflective control (Trust-R), was developed for a robot swarm to understand the collaborative mission and calibrate its motions accordingly for better emergency response. Typical emergent tasks “transit between area inspection tasks”, “response to emergent target - car accident” in social security with eight fault-related situations were designed to simulate robot deployments. A human user study with 50 volunteers was conducted to model trust and assess swarm performance. Trust-R's effectiveness in supporting a robot team for emergency response was validated by improved task performance and increased trust scores.","PeriodicalId":423263,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130064564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}