RoboCupRescue: The Grand Challenge

RoboCupRescue is a new research domain of RoboCup which targets search and rescue in large scale disasters, such as earthquake which hit Kobe, killing over 5,000 people.
We chose this domain because it is socially significant problem, and has common features with game of soccer in various aspects, such as dynamic environment, incomplete and noisy information. It also has features that are missing in soccer, such as logistics, heterogeneous agents, long-range planning, and emergent collaboration between teams of agents.

From the research perspective, we can investigate essential aspects of multi-agent systems andartificial intelligence by comparing two domains that has some commonalities, and has complementary features.

However, the long range goal of RoboCupRescue initiativeis to foster the science and engineering of search and rescue for large scale disaster, so that our reserch can directly contribute to society, and save people's life.

RoboCupSoccer is defined as the landmark project, which has the goal of building a team of fully autonomous humanoid which beats human World Cup champion by 2050, and aims at spreading of technologies developed for the accomplishment of the goal. On the contrary, the RoboCupRescue define itself to be the grand challenge project, where the accomlishment of its long range goal directly contribute to the society. Thus, RoboCupRecue is a research and development initiative by itself, as well as being a domain of application of technologies developped through RoboCup Soccer.

For RoboCupRescue, we will organize workshop and conferences, as well as research evaluation sessions, where progress of research will be compared and evaluated using the standard benchmark environment. Similar to current RoboCup Soccer, there will be trackes for simulator and real robots. We are currently, developing simulator for RoboCupRescue.
There are four projects in RoboCupRescue, two of them are underway.