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The IUB Rescue Arena,
a testbed for rescue robots research
Andreas Birk
International University Bremen
Campus Ring 1
28759 Bremen, Germany
E-mail a.birk@iu-bremen.de
Abstract
Mobile robots can be highly valuable tools in Urban
Rescue Missions, inspecting collapsed buildings, as-
sessing the situation, looking for victims and establish-
ing a first contact to them. At the International Uni-
versity Bremen (IUB), rescue robots for these tasks are
developed since 2001. All components of the robots,
ranging from mechanics over computational hardware
to all software levels have been to a large extent custom
designed for the difficult task of rescue missions. The
newly established rescue arena at IUB plays an impor-
tant role in the development cycle of the robots. It pro-
vides the necessary complex and realistic test-scenario
to provide feedback about the deficiencies of the robots
and to allow the investigation of advanced algorithms,
especially for control, localization and mapping.
Keywords: search and rescue, systems engineering,
mobile robots, performance measure
Appeared in:
A. Birk, ”The IUB Rescue Arena, a testbed for
rescue robots research,” in Second IEEE International
Workshop on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics
(SSRR), Bonn, Germany, 2004.
@inproceedings{response_robot_arena_SSRR04,
author = {Birk, Andreas},
title = {The IUB Rescue Arena, a testbed for
rescue robots research},
booktitle = {Second IEEE International Workshop on
Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)},
publisher = {Gustav-Stresemann-Institut (GSI)},
ISBN = {3-8167-6556-4},
year = {2004},
type = {Conference Proceedings}
}
1 Overview
IUB robotics is actively working in the domain of
rescue robots since 2001. The team has already par-
ticipated in RoboCup 2002 in Fukuoka and RoboCup
2003 in Padua [BCK04, BKR+02]. The team ended
on both occasions on a 4th place in the ranking. Fur-
thermore, the team won in 2003 a technical award for
its mapping capabilities [CKB03]. The robot hard-
ware development is based on the CubeSystem for fast
robot prototyping [Bir04, BKW98].
The goal of the IUB team is to get within the next
two years to a status where the overall system can be
launched and used by rescue workers who have un-
dergone hardly any training for the system. Crucial
issues are the turn-key start-up of the robots and an
intuitive user-interface of the operator’s console. For
this purpose, all software components are integrated in
a general framework that supports adjustable auton-
omy. The annual participation in the RoboCup com-
petitions proved to be a crucial element in the devel-
opment cycles of the robots. To achieve the ambitious
goal of getting fieldable system, it became clear that
a more permanent evaluation basis is needed. Hence,
a rescue arena has been set up at IUB for testing and
training purposes.
The arena covers three different levels, the so-called
yellow, red, and the orange zone. This approach is
modeled after the test arena design from the Ameri-
can National Institute for Standards and Technology
(NIST), which is based on data from real catastro-
phes. This approach of the NIST arenas has also been
already used in the RoboCup competitions from 2001
on. Yellow models an intact building structure with
a normal office or home interior that has been mildly
affected by the disaster. In the orange zone, the ef-
fects to the interior as well as to the building itself are
much more severe. Last but not least, the red zone
is a model of a pancake collapse with large amount of
rubble and highly instable structures. The IUB arena
is an extension of the concepts of the NIST arena. One
particular feature is its compactness as it is based on
Figure 1: Papa goose locating a victim in the yellow
zone.
Figure 2: Mama goose locating a victim in the orange
zone.
Figure 3: Mother and papa goose entering the orange
arena at the RoboCup 2003 competition.
Figure 4: Papa goose operating in red zone.
a high bay racking system. This allows to have a large
floor-space and many different levels. The arena has
a footprint of 5.60m by 4.70m and it is approximately
6m high. It has 3 main floors and several intermediate
floors, which are interconnected.
References
[BCK04] Andreas Birk, Stefano Carpin, and Holger
Kenn. The IUB 2003 rescue robot team.
In D. Polani, B. Browning, A. Bonarini,
and K. Yoshida, editors, RoboCup 2003:
Robot Soccer World Cup VII, volume 3020
of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
(LNAI). Springer, 2004.
[Bir04] Andreas Birk. Fast robot prototyping with
the cubesystem. In International Confer-
ence on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
IEEE Press, 2004.
[BKR+02] Andreas Birk, Holger Kenn, Martijn
Rooker, Agrawal Akhil, Balan Horia
Vlad, Burger Nina, Burger-Scheidlin
Christoph, Devanathan Vinod, Erhan Du-
mitru, Hepes Ioan, Jain Aakash, Jain Pre-
mvir, Liebald Benjamin, and Luksys Ge.
The IUB 2002 rescue robot team. In Gal
Kaminka, Pedro U. Lima, and Raul Rojas,
editors, RoboCup-02: Robot Soccer World
Cup VI, LNAI. Springer, 2002.
[BKW98] Andreas Birk, Holger Kenn, and Thomas
Walle. Robocube: an ”universal” ”special-
purpose” hardware for the robocup small
robots league. In 4th International Sympo-
sium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic
Systems. Springer, 1998.
[CKB03] S. Carpin, H. Kenn, and A. Birk. Au-
tonomous mapping in the real robot rescue
league. In Robocup 2003. Springer, 2003.
