A Pragmatic Approach to Robot Rescue: The Keystone Fire Brigade

Contents

The Keystone Fire Brigade is a robotic rescue team that has competed in the 2002 competitions in both Fukuoka (RoboCup) and Edmonton (AAAI). The key elements of our approach are emphasis on autonomy, vision-based computing, and implementation on inexpensive robot bases (e.g., toy cars). This paper describes our motivations in developing the Keystone Fire Brigade, and describes the key elements of the design: the hardware employed and the visual processing algorithms used for localization and victim identification. We also describe our experiences in the test domains