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The Team CASualty RoboCup Rescue Robot League homepage!

Welcome to the Team CASualty RoboCup Rescue Robot League homepage!

The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems (CAS) is one of the world's foremost research institutes into robotics.

CASTER, the 2005 Team CASualty robot, which came 3rd in the
2005 RoboCup Rescue Robot League competition!

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2006 competition wrapupThe final few days of competition were a combination of good and bad ... our first semifinal run went well, we were able to identify 3 victims all with victim tags and 3 signs of life, including one that ended up with CASTER Scorpion driving off a 50cm ledge (deliberately of course!).

However, things took a turn for the worst for our second semifinal run. Despite extensive testing after the first time the arm was fixed, similar wiring in another section of the arm failed around 30 seconds into the second run! We had to finish the run with our Redback robots but a lack of time and communications dropouts prevented us from scoring more than one victim, putting us out of the competition ...

We had somewhat greater success in the autonomy challenge a couple of days later though. In this challenge, the robot must traverse a passageway autonomously. This passageway has twists and turns in it and has a floor that is smooth but has ramps in it. Work concentrated on getting HOMER, our autonomous platform developed at UTS, ready for this challenge. After some time spent getting communications and victim identification working properly, it was ready to roll ... and managed to get proximity to and identify 2 victims during the challenge. This turned out to be enough to land us 2nd place in the autonomy challenge, behind Freiburg University!

Ah well, at least we didn't come away completely empty-handed ...

Created: 2006-06-26 02:37 Last modified: 2006-06-26 02:37 (Sydney time)

Competition days 1 and 2The last couple of days have been ... interesting.

We started practicing well and were able to get the robot up and down stairs nicely after making a few modifications to our mobility arm. This involved mainly placing wooden skids at strategic positions (and here I was thinking we wouldn't need to do any woodwork on the robot!).

When it came time to do our run though it was a different story - our lasers on CASTER Scorpion didn't come up and in the rush to try and get them up we lost the cameras! We ended up doing our first (of three) preliminary run with only the two Redbacks and a rather severe lag problem and ended up scoring zero.

That wasn't the end of the problems though - just as we finished up for the night the arm stalled and wouldn't respond! Tired and somewhat puzzled, we decided to call it a night and headed back to the hotel.

This morning we tracked the arm problem to a broken serial comms line partway up the arm. Another bit of wire and some duct tape saw the arm back in action! Reasonably confident, we did a pile of practice deployments to make sure we had the procedure down pat before our first run at noon. Getting set up fast is a big advantage in this game - you get 20 minutes to set up and run so the faster you set up, the more time you have in the arena.

However, the dreaded lasers stopped operating just as we were about to deploy! We had made some changes to our code so now it on...
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Created: 2006-06-16 07:39 Last modified: 2006-06-16 07:39 (Sydney time)

Setup Day 1Yesterday (12th) was the first proper setup day for the competition ... and the usual setup day fun and games ensued ... we got to the venue nice and early to do some work and found that our robot hadn't arrived and no-one knew what was happening with it!

It wasn't until late in the morning that we found out that our couriers hadn't passed on some vital paperwork to the shipping agents and that our robots were in fact sitting in a warehouse just minutes away from us ...

In the meantime, we got to work putting together our Redback robots and running them around, thankfully they arrived in our hold luggage in one piece. Unfortunately due to a software glitch one of them ran away from us and resulted in some gear damage - a gearbox swap and the addition of a firmware watchdog solved that problem!

Our robot shipment, which contained CASTER, support equipment and tools, arrived early in the afternoon and we set to work getting it out and putting the battery and computer back into it. It seemed to survive the trip well and worked out of the box, which is always a nice surprise! Our severe modifications to the robot did catch Woo Sub Lee, the leader of the ROSCUE team by surprise (ROSCUE represents the Korean Institute of Science and Technology, who designed and built the DT3-robot on which CASTER is based) - to the extent that he said "This is not a DT-3!".

The rest of the day was spent doing test runs of the partial...
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Created: 2006-06-13 15:34 Last modified: 2006-06-13 15:34 (Sydney time)

Team CASualty arrives in Bremen!After a long flight (9 hours from Sydney to Bangkok, 11 hours from Bangkok to to Frankfurt then another hour to Bremen!) Team CASualty has arrived in Bremen, Germany, in preparation for RoboCup 2006! Apart from a minor luggage mishap that resulted in a few of our robots taking a slightly delayed route things are looking good ...
setup starts on the 12th of June, competition starts on the 14th.

Created: 2006-06-12 06:34 Last modified: 2006-06-12 14:07 (Sydney time)

CAS Rescue 3rd!

OSAKA, July 21 - In its first year in the competition, an Australian team has achieved an amazing third place in the Rescue Robot league of RoboCup 2005. The competition was fierce, with 26 teams from universities and research institutes around the world fielding real robots in a mockup of a disaster site.

Team CASualty consists of members from UTS Mechatronics and UNSW Computing, both of which are part of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Autonomous Systems (CAS). Team CASualty fielded two robots: CASTER, a remotely operated, heavy duty tank-like robot capable of handling rough terrain; and HOMER, a smaller, faster robot, designed for running without human intervention.

In the Rescue Robot league, robots explore a specially constructed disaster site about the size of a small house. The disaster site includes mannequins with various signs of life, such as waving hands, shouting noises and heat, hidden amongst stairs, platforms and building rubble. The robots, some under human control, must find and approach the victims, identify their signs of life and produce a map of the site showing where the victims are located. The aim is to provide human rescuers with enough information to safely perform a rescue. Each team is scored based on the quality of its maps, the accuracy of the victim information and the number of victims found.

According to judges, Team CASualty had excellent mapping and victim identification capabilities, with a...
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Created: 2005-08-09 15:30 Last modified: 2005-08-09 15:30 (Sydney time)