RESCUE Cooperative Navigation for Rescue Robots 3rd Year Technical Report

During its third year, the research work on the RESCUE project was spread over several topics of short and long term application to real robots and scenarios, some of them new within the project, others extending past activities. This slightly more detailed report of the activity carried out during year 3 summarizes the progresses made. It is composed of three main sections (navigation, distributed planning and architectures) and two appendices with the full version of technical reports describing the work on the vision-based navigation of the aerial robot and the software plus functional architectures. The latter is the final activity report of the project grantee, João Frazão, whose grant within the project finished last October 2003. In Section 2, the progresses on both the vision-based navigation of the aerial (blimp) robot and the topological navigation and mapping of the land robot are presented. Section 3 introduces work on distributed planning for a multi-robot rescue team, based on distributed Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems techniques, and tested on a simulator which emulates scenarios that could well be the subject of future applications using real robots, as an extension of the current project. Finally, Section 4 summarizes the concepts concerning the software and functional architectures that will support the project development, and its implementation.