RoboCupRescue - Agent Simulation

Natural disasters are major adverse events that cause large-scale economic, human, and environmental losses. They are usually difficult to predict and it is even more challenging to prevent them from happening. These characteristics demand disaster management strategies to be in place for the mitigation of damaging consequences when a disaster happen. Robocup Rescue Simulation is an education and research project initiated in reaction to a concrete natural disaster, the Great Hanshin earthquake, which hit Hyōgo Prefecture – Japan on January 17, 1995 killing more than six thousand people, most of them in the city of Kobe. The RoboCup Rescue Agent Simulation League's mission is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels. The effective implementation of this mission is translated into three main aims

• the league aims to promote the development of new computational artifacts that may improve the distributed coordination and planning among these heterogenous artificial entities when performing search and rescue tasks on disaster scenarios
• the league aims to provide a simulation software able to realistically represent natural disaster scenarios where these computational artifacts can be assessed
• the league aims to promote these research and development activities by conducting competitions to stimulate the exchange of ideas and experience among practitioners.