The Future of Robot Rescue Simulation Workshop An initiative to increase the number of participants in the league

Although the environment of RoboCup Rescue Simulation League is well used in research initiatives, the number of teams that are willing to benchmark their overall performance in a yearly competition is dropping. Yet, recent disasters have made clear how important continuous development in this field is. Previous initiatives were focused on improving the simulation environment, the documentation and the visualization towards the public, but this time we are trying to build a community. In The Future of Robot Rescue Simulation Workshop all participants worked together to define a roadmap, test the environment, create tutorials how to integrate perception, planning and control modules, build logging and visualization tools, and finalize the rules for the competition. This workshop should have an impact far outside the RoboCup community; it should also be relevant for related initiatives as the DARPA Robotics Challenge and the Japanese Virtual Robot Challenge. This is accomplished by publishing the code as ROS-nodes, including tutorial-pages how to use this code. Beyond the fact that the number of interested participants was larger than the number of available places and a selection had to be made, also the feedbacks from the participants confirm the success of the workshop.