Ground and aerial robots as an aid to alpine search and rescue: Initial SHERPA outcomes

The SHERPA project funded by the European Community's 7th Framework Program (ICT 600958), addresses the development of a team of ground and aerial robots to act as an aid to alpine search-and-rescue missions. Following the kickoff of the project on February 1st 2013 and the thorough research on the conditions under which such missions are currently conducted, we study the applicability of existing technologies, while envisioning the next steps up to the 4-year horizon of this project and beyond. Here, we present a briefly account of the outcomes of our study, mainly concentrated on setting up meaningful operative scenarios and relevant benchmarks, which will be used throughout the project in order to test the robotic platforms and the software frameworks developed, as well as relevant measures of success for these. This phase of the research activity has been carried out in cooperation with the SHERPA end-users, the Club Alpino Italiano [2], as well as the Swiss Air Rescue [3] and the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research [4], who are members of the Advisory Board of SHERPA. The complete study summarized in this report can be found in [5].