RoboCup Rescue Simulation League Research Articles

Agent-Development Framework Based on Modular Structure to Research Disaster-Relief Activities

This article describes approaches to the RoboCup Rescue Simulation league which is a part of the response to recent large-scale natural disasters. In particular, the project provides a platform for studying disaster-relief agents and simulations. The aim of the project is to contribute to society is by making widely available the findings our research into disaster relief. Some disaster-relief agents contain excellent algorithm modules, which should ideally be shareable among developers. However, this is hindered when the program structure of the agents are different among different teams. Therefore, this article designs and implements a modular agent-development framework that unifies the structure within RoboCup Rescue Simulation agents to facilitate such technical exchange.

FC PORTUGAL: DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF A NEW ROBOCUP RESCUE TEAM

FC Portugal Rescue team is the result of a cooperation project between the Universities of Aveiro and Porto in Portugal. Following previous collaborations of these two Portuguese Universities in RoboCup simulation league and associated competitions, this project intends to fully adapt the coordination methodologies developed by FC Portugal simulated soccer team to the search and rescue scenario. After FC Portugal's first successful participation in RoboCup rescue simulation league (Osaka, 2005), the team aimed at introducing new high-level strategic analysis tools in the Rescue league and developed FCPx tool. This tool enables an easy comparison of different teams' strategies, and the use of learning methodologies for high-level strategic decisions in rescue. The tool also enabled us to evaluate our coordination methodologies, analysing the results achieved in several rescue parameters, and conclude that they are very promising for the search and rescue domain. FC Portugal Rescue team results are very promising achieving first place in RoboCup European Championship 2006 (Dutch Open) held in Eindhoven.

RoboCup rescue: A grand challenge for multiagent and intelligent systems

Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issues that involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment. The intention of the RoboCup Rescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels, involving multiagent teamwork coordination, physical agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision-support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies, and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive system in the future. For this effort, which was built on the success of the RoboCup Soccer project, we will provide forums of technical discussions and competitive evaluations for researchers and practitioners. Although the rescue domain is intuitively appealing as a large-scale multiagent and intelligent system domain, analysis has not yet revealed its domain characteristics. The first research evaluation meeting will be held at RoboCup-2001, in conjunction with the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2001), as part of the RoboCup Rescue Simulation League and RoboCup/AAAI Rescue Robot Competition. In this article, we present a detailed analysis of the task domain and elucidate characteristics necessary for multiagent and intelligent systems for this domain. Then, we present an overview of the RoboCup Rescue project.