The RoboCup Rescue Team Deutschland1

The RoboCup Rescue competition aims at boosting research in robots and infrastructure able to help in real rescue missions. The task is to find and report victims in areas of different grades of roughness, which are currently indoor. It challenges to some extreme the mobility of robot platforms as well as the autonomy of their control and sensor interpretation software. In the 2004 competition, the Kurt3D robot was introduced, the first participant capable of mapping its environment in 3D and self-localizing in all six degrees of freedom, i.e., x, y, z positions and roll, yaw and pitch angles. In 2005, we have upgraded the system with more sensors, with a focus on speeding up the algorithms, and we have started to develop a tracked robot platform to cooperate with Kurt3D. This paper gives an introduction to the competition in general and presents main contributions of our Deutschland1 RoboCup Rescue team.