On Simulation of Flood and Land Slide Disaster Areas in Urban Environments for Robotized Search and Rescue

Abstract

Every year Asian countries experience significant number of heavy rains, associated flood and landslide disasters. These may cause serious damage of infrastructure and typically result in human casualties. In order to deal with the problems that are caused by such natural disasters we suggest to develop a novel international framework, which targets to provide effective disaster response employing heterogeneous robotic teams and information collection system for a disaster site management. The information collection system targets to become a worldwide standard in the future. In order to test and verify novel concepts and algorithms a proper simulation of a disaster site and robots that are operating within this site are required. In this paper we present preliminary results of simulating a disaster site and a number of robot models in ROS Gazebo environment that are used to test the simulation quality and feasibility from the point of resources and time complexity. The presented models were constructed by the members of our research team and correspond to real robots that are used at LIRS for the project. The models were tested in the simulated environments under a number of pilot protocols for heterogeneous robotic teams' interactions.