Development of an autonomous rescue robot within the USARSim 3D virtual environment

The increasing interest towards rescue robotics and the complexity of typical rescue environments make it necessary to use high fidelity 3D simulators during the application development phase. USARSim is an open source high fidelity simulator for rescue environments, based on a commercial game engine. In this paper, we describe the development of an autonomous rescue robot within the USARSim simulation environment. We describe our rescue robotic system and present the extensions we made to USARSim in order to have a satisfying simulation of our robot. Moreover, as a case study, we present an algorithm to avoid obstacles invisible to our laser scanner based mapping process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.