TIRAMISU-ICARUS: FP7-Projects Challenges for Robotics Systems

TIRAMISU: Clearing large civilian areas from anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions is a difficult problem because of the large diversity of hazardous areas and explosive contamination. A single solution does not exist and many Mine Action actors have called for a toolbox from which they could choose the tools best fit to a given situation. Some have built their own toolboxes, usually specific to their activities, such as clearance. The TIRAMISU project aims at providing the foundation for a global toolbox that will cover the main Mine Action activities, from the survey of large areas to the actual disposal of explosive hazards, including Mine Risk Education. The toolbox produced by the project will provide Mine Action actors with a large set of tools, grouped into thematic modules, which will help them to better perform their job. These tools will have been designed with the help of end-users and validated by them in mine affected countries. ICARUS: Recent dramatic events such as the earthquakes in Haiti and L’Aquila or the flooding in Pakistan have shown that local civil authorities and emergency services have difficulties with adequately managing crises. The result is that these crises lead to major disruption of the whole local society. The goal of ICARUS is to decrease the total cost (both in human lives and in euro) of a major crisis. In order to realise this goal, the ICARUS project proposes to equip first responders with a comprehensive and integrated set of unmanned search and rescue tools, to increase the situational awareness of human crisis managers and to assist search and rescue teams for dealing with the difficult and dangerous, but life-saving task of finding human survivors. As every crisis is different, it is impossible to provide one solution which fits all needs. Therefore, the ICARUS project will concentrate on developing components or building blocks that can be directly used by the crisis managers when arriving on the field. The ICARUS tools consist of assistive unmanned air, ground and sea vehicles, equipped with human detection sensors. The ICARUS unmanned vehicles are intended as the first explorers of the area, as well as in-situ supporters to act as safeguards to human personnel. The unmanned vehicles collaborate as a coordinated team, communicating via ad hoc cognitive radionetworking. To ensure optimal human-robot collaboration, these ICARUS tools are seamlessly integrated into the C4I equipment of the human crisis managers and a set of training and support tools is provided to the human crisis to learn to use the ICARUS system.