Coordinated action in a heterogeneous rescue team

In this paper we describe a new approach to make use of a heterogeneous robot team for the RoboCup Rescue League Virtual Robot competition. We will demonstrate coordinated action between a flying and a ground robot. The flying robot is used for fast exploration and allows the operator to find the places where victims are present in the environment. Due to the fast aggregation of the location error in the flying robot no precise location of the victim is known. It is the task of the ground robot to autonomously go the point of interest and to get an accurate location of the victim, which can be used by human rescue workers to save the victim. The benefit of this approach is demonstrated in a small number of experiments. By integrating the abilities of the two robots the team’s performance is improved.