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Urban Search and Rescue
Head: Katia Sycara
Contact: Lori R Price (lrprice@cs.cmu.edu)

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Associated center: CIMDS
Associated lab/group: Intelligent Software Agents

For more information, see this project's homepage.

This page last updated - November 2005.

To address the challenges of urban search and rescue, we propose Hybrid Teams of Autonomous Agents: Cyber Agents, Robots and People (CARPs) consisting of large number of these entities that are distributed in space, time, capability, and roles. We move away from the traditional human-controlled design of automation, where automated systems are subordinate to their human controllers who give them their goals and tasks and manage task execution. Instead, we advocate a cooperative control (adjustable autonomy) paradigm where current notions of organizational control and system interactions are extended based on adaptive sharing.

The various members of CARP groups, be they human, robots or cyber-agents, share common goals; initiative for communication and action, responsibility for coherent group activity; information on the environment, mission, situation; and share in helping each other in overcoming barriers to achievement of common goals. Ad hoc interoperability across different agents, teams and organizations are brought together "as is", and co-adaptation to each other addresses the challenges present in such large-scale, uncertain coordination domains.

Name - Title <Email Address>
• [Home] Joseph Andrew Giampapa - Project Manager <garof@andrew.cmu.edu>
• Michael Lewis - Professor <ml@sis.pitt.edu>
• [Home] Illah Nourbakhsh - Associate Professor <illah@ri.cmu.edu>
• Binoy Shah - Student Assistant, MechE <bshah+@andrew.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Katia Sycara - Research Professor <katia@cs.cmu.edu>
• Jijun Wang - Program Assistant <jiw1+@pitt.edu>
• Mark Yong - Program Assistant, ECE <cyong+@andrew.cmu.edu>

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Heterogeneous Multirobot Coordination with Spatial and Temporal Constraints
  M. Koes, I. Nourbakhsh, and K. Sycara
  Proceedings of the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), AAAI Press, June, 2005, pp. 1292-1297. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [424 KB] copyrighted

• Human-Robot Teaming for Search and Rescue
  I. Nourbakhsh, K. Sycara, M. Koes, M. Yong, M. Lewis, and S. Burion
  IEEE Pervasive Computing: Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems, January, 2005, pp. 72-78. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1458 KB] copyrighted

• Communication Efficiency in Multi-agent Systems
  M. Koes, I. Nourbakhsh, and K. Sycara
  Proceedings of ICRA 2004, Vol. 3, May, 2004, pp. 2129 - 2134. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [469 KB] copyrighted

• A learning algorithm for localizing people based on wireless signal strength that uses labeled and unlabeled data
  M. Koes, B.P. Sellner, B. Lisien, G. Gordon, and F. Pfennig
  Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2003. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [94 KB] copyrighted