[robocup-worldwide] [meetings] SSRR Special Session on "Obstacles on the way to a broad deployment of robot technology in disaster response"

[Gerald Steinbauer]

Call for Contribution

Special Session on

Obstacles on the way to a broad deployment of robot technology in
disaster response

collocated with the 12th IEEE International Symposium on Safety,
Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR 2014)

Motivation:

Due to great advances in research and technology recently robots -
mainly unmanned aerial vehicles, but also ground, underwater and surface
vehicles – gained a lot of attention and interest by national and
international organizations concerned with disaster response. There are
many interesting examples where robot technology has been successfully
contributed to the mitigation of disasters such as hurricane Katrina,
Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and recent floods on the Balkan.
Although, the technology has been proven to be useful and mature a broad
deployment of robot technology and all neighboring technologies such as
computer vision and mapping is hardly seen. Obviously, there are still a
number of serious obstacles that prevent a broad deployment.

There are still a number of unsolved technical problems such as
performance, robustness, endurance, and operability. These questions
will be usually addressed by technical programs of events like the SSRR.
In this special session we like to target other groups of obstacles such
as organizational, operational, tactical, legal, and ethical issues. For
this session we like to invite responders, policy makers, researchers
and industry to discuss which obstacles are in the way and how these
obstacles can be removed. It is envisioned to collect these issues but
also best practice examples and to initiate the development of a road map.

The related topics are (but not limited to):

* possible and realistic use cases
* chain of command and responsibility
* legal issues  and liability
* operator and responder training for new technologies
* equipment certification and maintenance
* models for sharing and providing technology
* activation mechanisms for technology on national and international level

Format:

The session will be held as a half-day mini-workshop. The session will
comprise 3 invited talks to provide stimulating inputs from research and
practice. An invited talk by Geert De Cubber is already confirmed.  The
invited talks are followed by a common session where participants will
have the possibility to briefly raise open questions or present best
practice examples. The workshop will be concluded by a common discussion
of all participants. In this session also possible follow-up activities
will be discussed.

Contribution and participation:

We like to invite all interested persons to attend the special session.
Moreover, we like to ask potential contributors to propose short
statement for the common session. Please send a short title and 3-4
sentences about issues or examples you like to present as email to
steinbauer at ist.tugraz.at. We will allocate 5’-10’ presentation time to
the selected topics (subject to the number of contributions).

Important dates:

October 17th 2014 – Submission of Contributions
October 20th 2014 – Notification of Acceptance
October 27th 2014 – Special Session

Robin Murphy
Andreas Ciossek
Gerald Steinbauer