MRsensing - Environmental Monitoring and Context Recognition with Cooperative Mobile Robots in Catastrophic Incidents
MRsensing - Environmental Monitoring and Context Recognition with Cooperative Mobile Robots in Catastrophic Incidents

Author: Nuno Filipe Loureiro Ferreira

Publisher: University of Coimbra

Published: 2013-09-01

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13:

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Multi-sensor information fusion theory concerns the environmental perception activities to combine data from multiple sensory resources. Humans, as any other animals, gather information from the environment around them using different biological sensors. Combining them allows structuring the decisions and actions when interacting with the environment. Under disaster conditions, effective mult-robot information sensor fusion can yield a better situation awareness to support the collective decision-making. Mobile robots can gather information from the environment by combining data from different sensors as a way to organize decisions and augment human perception. The is especially useful to retrieve contextual environmental information in catastrophic incidents where human perception may be limited (e.g., lack of visibility). To that end, this work proposes a specific configuration of sensors assembled in a mobile robot, which can be used as a proof of concept to measure important environmental variables in an urban search and rescue (USAR) mission, such as toxic gas density, temperature gradient and smoke particles density. This data is processed through a support vector machine classifier with the purpose of detecting relevant contexts in the course of the mission. The outcome provided by the experiments conducted with TraxBot and Pioneer-3DX robots under the Robot Operating System framework opens the door for new multi-robot applications on USAR scenarios. This work was developed within the CHOPIN research project which aims at exploiting the cooperation between human and robotic teams in catastrophic accidents.

War and Decision
War and Decision

Author: Douglas J. Feith

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 700

ISBN-13: 0061763462

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In the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, journalists, commentators, and others have published accounts of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. But no senior Pentagon official has offered an inside view of those years, or has challenged the prevailing narrative of that war—until now. Douglas J. Feith, the head of the Pentagon's Policy organization, was a key member of Donald Rumsfeld's inner circle as the Administration weighed how to protect the nation from another 9/11. In War and Decision, he puts readers in the room with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, General Tommy Franks, and other key players as the Administration devised its strategy and war plans. Drawing on thousands of previously undisclosed documents, notes, and other written sources, Feith details how the Administration launched a global effort to attack and disrupt terrorist networks; how it decided to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime; how it came to impose an occupation on Iraq even though it had avoided one in Afghanistan; how some officials postponed or impeded important early steps that could have averted major problems in Iraq's post-Saddam period; and how the Administration's errors in war-related communications undermined the nation's credibility and put U.S. war efforts at risk. Even close followers of reporting on the Iraq war will be surprised at the new information Feith provides—presented here with balance and rigorous attention to detail. Among other revelations, War and Decision demonstrates that the most far-reaching warning of danger in Iraq was produced not by State or by the CIA, but by the Pentagon. It reveals the actual story behind the allegations that the Pentagon wanted to "anoint" Ahmad Chalabi as ruler of Iraq, and what really happened when the Pentagon challenged the CIA's work on the Iraq–al Qaida relationship. It offers the first accurate account of Iraq postwar planning—a topic widely misreported to date. And it presents surprising new portraits of Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Richard Armitage, L. Paul Bremer, and others—revealing how differences among them shaped U.S. policy. With its blend of vivid narrative, frank analysis, and elegant writing, War and Decision is like no other book on the Iraq war. It will interest those who have been troubled by conflicting accounts of the planning of the war, frustrated by the lack of firsthand insight into the decision-making process, or skeptical of conventional wisdom about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the global war on terrorism—efforts the author continues to support.