Rescue Robots Find Dolls In Maze Of Doom
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 23 of April , 2008 at 12:36 am
I’m not sure whose idea it was to put some poor kid’s dolls inside this maze, but it’s a good thing that a bunch of very capable robots are competing to find them all. RoboCup Rescue (the video above was taken at a German warm-up event) challenges robots to navigate and map a complex 150 square meter three dimensional maze of blocks, stairs, and pipes that simulates a disaster area… Something like what my office will look like when the next big quake hits San Francisco. Anytime now. No? Not yet? Okay, moving on.
The dolls wiggle around, make noise, emit CO2, and get warm, just like real babies/people. The robots are completely autonomous, and are scored both on how many dolls they find and how accurate of a map they construct while doing so. Currently, the time it takes for autonomous robots to survey an area and then produce a map usable by search and rescue teams is on the order of 10-20 minutes, which is just too long to be practical, but as with everything else these days, faster/better/cheaper is a future inevitability.
[ RoboCup Rescue ] VIA [ New Scientist ]
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Comment by eric
Made Tuesday, 12 of January , 2010 at 12:18 pm
That’s a disaster. Replace all “save” with “kill”, and you will know it’s first applications.