Creating Common Presence for a Multientity Rescue Team

The paper presents a multientity rescue team consisting of both human and robotic members that are in remotely connected to a coordinator. Both entities explore a common area and provide both verbal description (human) and accurate mapping data from their local environment. This information is fused with a possible apriori map resulting an environmental model called common presence. Common presence is updated continuously with new information and it includes the latest available information from whole area where the entities are or have been. Both entities will get continuous updates of the common presence in the form they best understand. With this information entities can improve their navigation and feeling of presence and exchange environment dependent information. The system and all the developed sub-systems are described and the test results of the integrated system are evaluated.