Section: Application Domains

Civil Robotics

Many applications for robotics technology exist within the services provided by national and local government. Typical applications include civil infrastructure services (See the Robotics 2020 Multi-Annual Roadmap [35], section 2.5.) such as: urban maintenance and cleaning; civil security services; emergency services involved in disaster management including search and rescue; environmental services such as surveillance of rivers, air quality, and pollution. These applications may be carried out by a wide variety of robot and operating modality, ranging from single robots or small fleets of homogeneous or heterogeneous robots. Often robot teams will need to cooperate to span a large workspace, for example in urban rubbish collection, and operate in potentially hostile environments, for example in disaster management. These systems are also likely to have extensive interaction with people and their environments.

The skills required for civil robots match those developed in the Larsen project: operating for a long time in potentially hostile environment, potentially with small fleets of robots, and potentially in interaction with people.