SHERPA

Smart Collaboration between Humans and Ground-Aerial Robots for Improving Rescuing Activities in Alpine Environments

The goal of SHERPA is to develop a mixed ground and aerial robotic platform to support search and rescue activities in a hostile environment such as encountered in alpine rescue. The group of ground and aerial robots must collaborate with the human rescuer and each other to achieve common goals. They also need to be able to support human rescuers while they are occupied with the rescuing activity (and thus unable to monitor the platform), which requires a high level of autonomy.

SHERPA will construct a platform with a focus on robust autonomy, natural interaction, and effective collaboration strategies utilizing the heterogeneous capabilities of the different actors: human, ground, and aerial vehicles.

The objective of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems group in this project is to build an integrated programming framework for hybrid knowledge representation that combines different sources of information, including natural language instructions, gestures, and visual observations, into a single framework. Furthermore, we will investigate and develop control mechanisms and reasoning engines suitable for flexible control and reactive decision-making in the SHERPA domain.

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