The DHRS-CIM project

Distributed Human-Robot System for Chemical Incident Management

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Aim and Objectives

The overall aim of this project is knowledge exchange between industrial and academic organizations in the field of Disaster Management; working towards implementing / prototyping, an intelligent decision support system for humans to manage chemical incidents.

This system can be described as a Distributed Human-Robot System for Chemical Incident Management (DHRS-CIM). This will include ground robots with Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MAV): the ground robots may be sensor rich vehicles for ground inspection whilst the MAVs have a reduced set of sensors (e.g. chemical sensor and stereo camera) that aid in the presentation of an overhead ground map.

The ultimate objectives are to:

(1) devise an intelligent system which can be deployed to detect (potential) chemical incidents,
(2) help crisis professionals to take informed decisions, and to
(3) manage chemical incidents via effective data gathering and representation.

MMVL is involved in WP1: Human / Robot sensing and decision support. Particularly in environment exploration, active perception and visualisation. The focus will be on the artificial perception and human interaction system in order to integrate sensor information into an intelligent collaborative system for human decision support.