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Abstract:
Search-and-rescue operations have recently been confronted with the introduction of robotic tools that assist the human search-and-rescue workers in their dangerous but life-saving job of searching for human survivors after major catastrophes. However, the world of search and rescue is highly reliant on strict procedures for the transfer of messages, alarms, data, and command and control over the deployed assets. The introduction of robotic tools into this world causes an important structural change in this procedural toolchain. Moreover, the introduction of search-and-rescue robots acting as data gatherers could potentially lead to an information overload toward the human search-and-rescue workers, if the data acquired by these robotic tools are not managed in an intelligent way. With that in mind, we present in this paper an integrated data combination and data management architecture that is able to accommodate real-time data gathered by a fleet of robotic vehicles on a crisis site, and we present and publish these data in a way that is easy to understand by end-users. In the scope of this paper, a fleet of unmanned ground and aerial search-and-rescue vehicles is considered, developed within the scope of the European ICARUS project. As a first step toward the integrated data-management methodology, the different robotic systems require an interoperable framework in order to pass data from one to another and toward the unified command and control station. As a second step, a data fusion methodology will be presented, combining the data acquired by the different heterogenic robotic systems. The computation needed for this process is done in a novel mobile data center and then (as a third step) published in a software as a service (SaaS) model. The SaaS model helps in providing access to robotic data over ubiquitous Ethernet connections. As a final step, we show how the presented data-management architecture allows for reusing recorded exercises with real robots and rescue teams for training purposes and teaching search-and-rescue personnel how to handle the different robotic tools. The system was validated in two experiments. First, in the controlled environment of a military testing base, a fleet of unmanned ground and aerial vehicles was deployed in an earthquake-response scenario. The data gathered by the different interoperable robotic systems were combined by a novel mobile data center and presented to the end-user public. Second, an unmanned aerial system was deployed on an actual mission with an international relief team to help with the relief operations after major flooding in Bosnia in the spring of 2014. Due to the nature of the event (floods), no ground vehicles were deployed here, but all data acquired by the aerial system (mainly three-dimensional maps) were stored in the ICARUS data center, where they were securely published for authorized personnel all over the world. This mission (which is, to our knowledge, the first recorded deployment of an unmanned aerial system by an official governmental international search-and-rescue team in another country) proved also the concept of the procedural integration of the ICARUS data management system into the existing procedural toolchain of the search and rescue workers, and this in an international context (deployment from Belgium to Bosnia). The feedback received from the search-and-rescue personnel on both validation exercises was highly positive, proving that the ICARUS data management system can efficiently increase the situational awareness of the search-and-rescue personnel.