MinERS: Minnesota Emergency Response Squad
RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation
The RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation competition provides a platform
for designing and testing disaster management and mitigation strategies
. The competition provides a multi agent simulation environment
where heterogeneous agents (Police, Fire Brigades, and Ambulances)
co-ordinate with each other to deal with a simulated disaster
scenario.
The overall objective of the competition is to save as many civilians
as possible and minimize the damage to the buildings that are on fire,
while at the same time clearing the rubble on the road for smooth routing.
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Map of Foligno: The above picture shows the map of the city
of Foligno. The city is damaged due to some natural calamity. Civilians(Green dots)
are trapped in the rubble of buildings, while the roads have several blockages.
There are some buildings that have started to catch fire too.
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Police Agents
Police agents are responsible for clearing rubbles present on the road.
The presence of rubble drastically hampers the movement of
ambulance agents and fire brigade agents over the map. Therefore, even
though police agents do not directly participate in the process of rescuing
civilians and dousing fire, they are inherently responsible for smooth
execution
of these tasks. There is also an implicit requirement that the rubble gets
cleared off from the environment as quickly as possible since any delay
will only slow down the routing of the other agents.
Ambulance Agents
In the simulation environment, ambulance agents are responsible for
saving civilians that are buried under a building after the disaster.
At the start of simulation none of the ambulance agents has any knowledge
of civilians that may be trapped or injured within buildings in the
city. The first challenge for them is to locate the civilians in the
buildings. Once an agent finds a civilian, the agent needs to first
remove the rubble from the buried civilian. The cost of execution,
i.e. time taken to execute, of this task is directly proportional the
level of buriedness of the civilian. Once all the rubble is removed the
civilian is loaded on the ambulance and then taken to refuge. Ambulance
agents cannot remove blockades from roads, so the route
chosen from the disaster location to the refuge should
avoid blockades. Otherwise, the ambulance agent has to raise a priority
task to a police agent.
Fire-Brigade Agents
During a high-intensity earthquake, there is a high chance of buildings
being razed to the ground. There is also a chance of fire erupting in
the buildings and spreading to nearby locations. In the robocup rescue
simulation project, the firesimulator is responsible for randomly selecting
buildings which should be ignited. Once a building catches fire,
its neighboring buildings in the block have a high chance of catching
fire too. Fires cause damage to the buildings which directly effects
the score. Hence, the responsibility of the fire brigade agents is to
douse the fire, as quickly as possible so that it does not spread further.
NEWS
[Date: March-04, 2009] MinERS clear the pre-qualification round!
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