Search and retrieval of human casualties in outdoor environments with unmanned ground systems - system overview and lessons learned from ELROB 2014

The European Land Robot Trail (ELROB) is a robot competition running for nearly 10 years now. Its focus changes between military and civilian applications every other year. Although the ELROB is now one of the most established competition events in Europe, there have been changes in the tasks over the years. In 2014, for the first time, a search and rescue scenario was provided. This paper addresses this Medical Evacuation (MedEvac) scenario and describes our system design to approach the challenge, especially our innovative control mechanism for the manipulator. Comparing our solution with the other teams' approaches we will show advantages which, finally, enabled us to achieve the first place in this trial.