Playing with disaster could save lives for real

By RICHARD WOOD

In a major disaster, it's one thing being able to put out fires efficiently and deal with medical emergencies on the spot, but you have to get your emergency vehicles there first.

That's the dramatic challenge for two University of Auckland PhD students and their home-grown artificial intelligence systems.

Cameron Skinner and Jonathan Teutenberg left on Monday for Padua, Italy, to compete against 20 other teams in the International RobocupRescue event.

The competition, which begins tomorrow, runs alongside RobocupSoccer, which aims to have an artificial soccer team that can beat the world's best humans by 2050.

The idea of RobocupRescue is to automate the emergency response when a city is hit by something like an earthquake.

The one that saves the most lives is the winner, and the city grids simulated are Kobe in Japan, Foligno in Italy and a made-up one called Virtual City.



Skinner said the ultimate goal was to create robotic vehicles for real-life situations. He said this technology was close to being useful in a limited fashion.

The Kiwi team has created fire truck, police car and ambulance software "agents". Each has individual programming, but they communicate with one another.

The Kiwis are the only group to enter from the South Pacific and are on a very limited budget. They have developed their system with an eight-processor Linux box to run the simulator and a laptop computer.

For the competition they will have access to six computers, three for the simulator and three for their agents.

With the help of a couple of lecturers, they have been working for six months. Other teams have been in the competition for three years.

"We're woefully under-resourced. Other teams have entire research groups dedicated to it," said Skinner.

He said the software agents had been built in the Java programming language using entirely new algorithms and involved about three months' programming time in total.

Standard "shortest path" algorithms could not be used because the environment was too "noisy", having to take into account traffic flow, traffic jams, other emergency vehicles loading injured people, and roadblocks caused by collapsed buildings and out-of-control fires.

"It has to plan a path to a fire and we don't know if the road will be blocked."

Skinner said they would be disappointed not to come in the top 10 and were aiming for a top-five finish.

www.robocup.org