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.

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 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 time taken to execute 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.

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 2010] MinERS clear the pre-qualification round!

[Date: March 2009] MinERS clear the pre-qualification round!