Daniel Serrano

By Daniela Doroftei, Geert De Cubber, Rene Wagemans, Anibal Matos, Eduardo Silva, Victor Lobo, Guerreiro Cardoso, Keshav Chintamani, Shashank Govindaraj, Jeremi Gancet and Daniel Serrano

The successful introduction and acceptance of novel technological tools are only possible if end users are completely integrated in the design process. However, obtaining such integration of end users is not obvious, as end‐user organizations often do not consider research toward new technological aids as their core business and are therefore reluctant to engage in these kinds of activities. This chapter explains how this problem was tackled in the ICARUS project, by carefully identifying and approaching the targeted user communities and by compiling user requirements. Resulting from these user requirements, system requirements and a system architecture for the ICARUS system were deduced. An important aspect of the user‐centered design approach is that it is an iterative methodology, based on multiple intermediate operational validations by end users of the developed tools, leading to a final validation according to user‐scripted validation scenarios.

Part of the book: Search and Rescue Robotics

By Daniel Serrano López, German Moreno, Jose Cordero, Jose Sanchez, Shashank Govindaraj, Mario Monteiro Marques, Victor Lobo, Stefano Fioravanti, Alberto Grati, Konrad Rudin, Massimo Tosa, Anibal Matos, Andre Dias, Alfredo Martins, Janusz Bedkowski, Haris Balta and Geert De Cubber

Search and rescue missions are complex operations. A disaster scenario is generally unstructured, time‐varying and unpredictable. This poses several challenges for the successful deployment of unmanned technology. The variety of operational scenarios and tasks lead to the need for multiple robots of different types, domains and sizes. A priori planning of the optimal set of assets to be deployed and the definition of their mission objectives are generally not feasible as information only becomes available during mission. The ICARUS project responds to this challenge by developing a heterogeneous team composed by different and complementary robots, dynamically cooperating as an interoperable team. This chapter describes our approach to multi‐robot interoperability, understood as the ability of multiple robots to operate together, in synergy, enabling multiple teams to share data, intelligence and resources, which is the ultimate objective of ICARUS project. It also includes the analysis of the relevant standardization initiatives in multi‐robot multi‐domain systems, our implementation of an interoperability framework and several examples of multi‐robot cooperation of the ICARUS robots in realistic search and rescue missions.

Part of the book: Search and Rescue Robotics