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 must also be able to support human rescuers while they are occupied with the rescuing activity (and thus unable to supervise the platform), requiring a high level of autonomy.

SHERPA will construct a platform with emphasis on robust autonomy, natural interaction, and effective collaboration strategies that utilize 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 which combines different information sources, including natural language instructions, gestures and visual observations into a single frame work. Furthermore, we will investigate and develop control mechanisms and reasoning engines which are suitable for flexible control and reactive decision-making in the SHERPA domain.

For more information and news, visit www.sherpa-project.eu

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