Hector Darmstadt - Heterogeneous Cooperating Teams of Robots

The Darmstadt Rescue Robot Team established at the Technische Universität Damstadt within the PhD program Cooperative, Adaptive and Responsive Monitoring in Mixed Mode Environments  funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). This program addresses two exciting and challenging research areas:
(1) navigation and coordination of multiple autonomous vehicles to perform a common task possibly together with a human mission manager; and
(2) monitoring in mixed mode environments that are characterized by the heterogeneity of their components in terms of resources, capabilities and connectivity.
The participation in RoboCup Rescue a step towards a heterogeneous real-world scenario. Driven by the goal of using heterogeneous cooperative hardware and software in disaster environments, a successful participation in RoboCup Rescue is an important milestone for these efforts. The interdisciplinarity of the Research Training Group allows us to combine established knowledge and elaborate tools from different disciplines to develop new solutions in search and rescue applications in the long run.
The experience in hardware and software of autonomous robots has already been successfully applied to RoboCup soccer, and there have been studies in simulation on cooperative control. Several members of the team have contributed to two top teams in the Four-Legged League ( Darmstadt Dribbling Dackels) and the Humanoid League (Darmstadt Dribblers).
Other members of the group are developing different computer vision algorithms for people detection and object recognition which can now be applied to the Search and Rescue scenario. In this group there is also a history of highly successful participation in recognition and perception challenges for computer vision. Finally, the team members from mechanical engineering are focusing on the design and experimental evaluation of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles for environmental monitoring and surveillance applications. They have recently participated in flight dynamics and autonomy competitions for micro aerial vehicles.

PhD students:

• Dipl.-Inform. Stefan Kohlbrecher
  Responsible for Project Management and SLAM
• Dipl.-Math. Karen Petersen
  Responsible for Behavior Programming.
• Dipl.-Inform. Johannes Meyer
  Responsible for Hardware Design, Sensor Fusion
• Dipl.-Ing. Thorsten Graber
  Responsible for RGB-D based obstacle detection and victim verification

Students:

• Florian Kunz
• Mark Sollweck
• Georg Stoll
• Laura Strickland
• Thomas Kanold

Advisors:

• Prof. Dr. Oskar von Stryk
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Uwe Klinauf
  

Alumni:

• Dipl. Ing. Armin Strobel
• Dr. rer. nat. Paul Schnitzspan
• Dr.-Ing. Mykhaylo Andriluka
• Dr.-Ing. Christian Reinl
• Dr.-Ing. Dirk Thomas
• Dr.-Ing. Martin Friedmann
• Anguelina Vatcheva
• Oliver Schwahn
• Peter Schauß
• Peter Englert
• Yongkie Wiyogo
• Tomislav Hasan
• Konstantin Fuchs
• Björn Wild