This paper describes the NATO STO IST-179RTG group's efforts to improve interoperability of semi-autonomous unmanned ground vehicles. Through experiments and demonstrations at major events like the European Robotics Hackathon 2021 and the European Land-Robot Trial 2022, a practical application of interoperability standards was investigated in different real-world scenarios, demonstrating both current capabilities and potential areas of improvement. This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel, IST-209RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Oeiras, Portugal, 13-14 May 2025

Testing and performance analysis for outdoor field robots can be quite challenging, as environmental conditions cannot be completely controlled. In this paper, we present the Field Test Tool, a free, open source framework for logging, annotating, and automatically generating reports of field trials for autonomous ground vehicles. The Field Test Tool integrates a database, an automatic report generator, a web server, an interface for the Robot Operating System, and a web-based user interface. The reporting tool was successfully deployed and used during the European Robotics Hackathon 2021 for a mobile robot performing a navigation task.

Automated exploration, environmental measuring and mapping using robotic systems is highly relevant in post-disaster scenarios. Challenging conditions and presence of unknown hazardous substances might disturb rescuers, affecting their performance or even endanger their lives. Under these circumstances, the deployment of robotic systems can reduce the risk and workload of rescuers and improve the situational awareness of emergency services. To accomplish this, multiple algorithms need to be synchronized on the robots. Behavior Trees offer a simple and modular structure for task execution, and provide a deep insight into complex task flows at first glance. The main contribution of this work is the development and integration of methods for environmental measuring and robot exploration using Behavior Trees. These methods include robot navigation, complete coverage planning, 2D/3D obstacle mapping and localization of hazard substances. Our solution is tailored for post-disaster scenarios and focuses on providing remote situational awareness for rescuers. Our system was successfully tested at the European Robotics Hackathon 2019, where a hazardous materials incident response operation was staged. With this implementation, we aim to simplify the system design and application of robotic systems used for autonomous operation.

This paper describes the research and experiment efforts of the NATO STO group IST-149-RTG capability concept demonstrator for interoperability within unmanned ground systems and C2 and the NAAG team of experts on UGV. The main purpose of the group was to investigate possible standards for controlling UGVs and tests them in a real world scenario. The efforts have been two folded, where the first effort was two NATO groups having an experiment demonstrating interoperability between the UGVs and OCUs available within the group. The Belgium contribution is done in the EU project ICARUS. Both efforts used the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) with the interoperability profile (IOP) to successfully enable interoperability between the systems. The trials showed that it is possible to extend the systems quite easily and achieve compliance with parts of the standard in a relatively short time.

Conventionally, data from radiation detectors is integrated over time, delivering a simple dose rate or energy spectrum. The time integration over several seconds makes it hard to locate a radioactive source when either the detector or the source is moving. A novel approach is to use the detector's much higher internal data rate and combine it with precise time and position information. In principle, this so-called list-mode data acquisition allows innovative algorithms that can locate and identify a radioactive source much faster than in the conventional approach. IEC 63047 is a recently introduced binary standard for list-mode data collection, which is applicable to data files and streams. The standard is specified using Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1). The format supports various types of time-stamped data and can be used in a wide range of applications involving radiation detection and measurement. It may also be used to represent data from other sensors than radiation detectors and supports positioning data from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). The standard has a wide potential for CBRNE detection equipment, including robotics. To facilitate the use of the standard, an open-source solution for encoding and decoding IEC 63047 messages has been implemented and tested. In addition, a simple demonstration device was developed from off-the-shelf components. Extensive laboratory and field tests were conducted to show that the standard itself as well as the demonstration device are suitable for typical radiological and nuclear (RN) inspection and monitoring tasks. For a better use with unmanned robot systems, a software interface between IEC 63047 and the Robot Operating System (ROS) was implemented. Finally, using this ROS interface, the demonstration device was integrated into an experimental robot system and successfully tested under RN field conditions at the European Robotics Hackathon (EnRicH).

Autonomous exploration and environmental measuring using robotic systems is highly relevant in natural or industrial post-disaster scenarios. Challenging conditions and presence of unknown hazardous substances might disturb rescuers, affecting their performance or even endanger their lives. Under these circumstances, robotic systems can be deployed to reduce the workload of rescuers and improve the situational awareness of emergency services.To accomplish this, several algorithms need to be synchronized on the robots. Behavior trees offers a simple and modular structure for task execution, able to provide a deep insight of complex task flow at first glance. To cover the scenario described in this work, we combine robot navigation, exploration and complete coverage planning, 2D/3D obstacle mapping and localization of hazard substances. Our main contribution is a behavior tree-based robot execution frame, which coordinates the sub-tasks of all these applications. Our system was successfully tested at the European Robotics Hackathon 2019, where a hazardous materials incident response operation was staged. With this implementation, we aim to simplify the system design and application of robotic systems used for autonomous operation.

IEC 63047 is a recently introduced binary standard for so-called list-mode data acquisition, which is applicable to data files and streams. The standard is specified using Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1). The format supports various types of time-stamped data and can be used in a wide range of applications involving radiation detection and measurement. It may also be used to represent data from other sensors than radiation detectors and supports positioning data from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). The standard has a wide potential for CBRNE detection equipment, including robotics. To facilitate the use of the standard, an open-source solution for encoding and decoding IEC 63047 messages has been implemented and tested. In addition, a simple demonstration device was developed from off-the-shelf components. For a better use with unmanned robot systems, a soft-ware interface between IEC 63047 and the Robot Operating System (ROS) was implemented. This paper describes the newly established standard and the demonstration device, and discusses its performance with respect to fulfilling the requirements of the standard and its applicability to typical field conditions for robotics in radiological and nuclear (RN) applications.

Natural disasters, industrial catastrophes and terror acts pose potential risks to everyone’s live and prosperity. Properly assessing such situations, especially in combination with radiological and nuclear (RN) threats, is a significant challenge. Several incidents in the past decades have underlined the urgent need for robotic platforms in scenarios involving radiation. However, the technical challenges when dealing with RN scenarios are immense. Unfortunately, engineers and developers often have no realistic testing possibilities, especially with regard to radiation sources, and cannot properly develop their robots for the demands of a real RN disaster site. Additionally, there is also a limited interest of the scientific community in getting their systems to work in the presence of radiation. One possible means to draw the attention of the robotics community towards such special tasks is through trials and competitions. Additionally, competitions also provide real world scenarios for testing which otherwise are often missing, allow a comparison and evaluation of the performance of different robot systems, and foster the use of important technical standards. This work describes advantages of this competition-based approach in general, and describes in detail one event with RN tasks and scenarios, which addresses all the mentioned aspects: the newly established European Robotics Hackathon (EnRicH).

Lessons learned from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters and from decommissioning of old nuclear facilities show that robots have certain advantages in this field. However, especially in situations with radiological and nuclear (RN) threats robotic systems have been of very limited practical use so far. This is mainly due to the severe technical difficulties and the lack of testing possibilities for such scenarios. But there is also a limited interest of the scientific community. One possible means to tackle these problems is through robotic trials and competitions. The paper motivates this approach and presents advantages and possible drawbacks. Afterwards, some of the few already established competitions with radiological and nuclear tasks and scenarios are described. For each of these events a detailed insight into the setting and the tasks, the obtained results, and the future way ahead is presented.

The ELROB'2018 competition brought together teams focusing on applications related to civilian security missions, the detection of improvised explosive devices (terrorist threat) and the evacuation of victims, scenarios favoured by Defence experts gathered in research groups of the Organization 'Science and Technology' of NATO. The aim of these competitions is to promote the best advances in technology and to strengthen cooperation in research. The ELROB event has been doubled this year by the organization of the 21st International Symposium on Robotics (ISMCR’2018) under the auspices of the International Measurement Confederation IMEKO, and more particularly its technical committee (TC17) coordinator of research in robotics, chaired by Japan, of which Belgium is an active member in charge of the organization of this symposium. Here, we provide the readers around the world the opportunity to access the recent advancements in robotics, mobile robotics in particular, especially in dynamic conditions.

In this paper we outline the euRathlon 2015 and the ERL Emergency 2017 Grand Challenge robotics competitions, and the results and lessons learned from euRathlon 2015. Staged at Piombino, Italy in September 2015, euRathlon 2015 was the world's first multi-domain (air, land and sea) multi-robot search and rescue competition. In a mock disaster scenario inspired by the 2011 Fukushima NPP accident the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge required teams of robots to cooperate to map the area, and missing workers and stem a leak. The second edition of the competition will be held also in Piombino in September 2017, under the name of ERL Emergency and as part of the new European Robotics League initiative.

This work concerns the study of 6DSLAM algorithms with an application of robotic mobile mapping systems. The architecture of the 6DSLAM algorithm is designed for evaluation of different data registration strategies. The algorithm is composed of the iterative registration component, thus ICP (Iterative Closest Point), ICP (point to projection), ICP with semantic discrimination of points, LS3D (Least Square Surface Matching), NDT (Normal Distribution Transform) can be chosen. Loop closing is based on LUM and LS3D. The main research goal was to investigate the semantic discrimination of measured points that improve the accuracy of final map especially in demanding scenarios such as multi-level maps (e.g., climbing stairs). The parallel programming based nearest neighborhood search implementation such as point to point, point to projection, semantic discrimination of points is used. The 6DSLAM framework is based on modi fied 3DTK and PCL open source libraries and parallel programming techniques using NVIDIA CUDA. The paper shows experiments that are demonstrating advantages of proposed approach in relation to practical applications. The major added value of presented research is the qualitative and quantitative evaluation based on realistic scenarios including ground truth data obtained by geodetic survey. The research novelty looking from mobile robotics is the evaluation of LS3D algorithm well known in geodesy.

Robotic technology has the potential to be a great relief for emergency response personnel - in their daily work as well as when facing extreme disasters. Robots can be employed to extinguish fires, search for hazardous materials, provide injured with first aid, or get them out of dangerous areas. They can map disrupted areas and assess structural damages of buildings, or they can simply help transporting heavy equipment. However, disaster response scenarios present challenges which need to be carefully investigated and rigorously solved in order to obtain systems which really can assist humans during emergencies and disasters. This paper identifies a number of possible deployment scenarios for robotic systems in emergency response operations. Several fields are identified in which already available robotic solutions can provide an important improvement for first responders compared to today's actual situation. The authors, then, describe a newly developed firefighting robot which offers some of these identified improvements for the emergency response personnel. Perhaps the most important feature - compared to many existing robotic fire extinguishing systems - is the possibility to introduce autonomous assistance functions into the field of firefighting operations.

Aim of this paper is to provide a review of the state of the art in Search and Rescue (SAR) robotics. Suitable robotic applications in the SAR domain are described, and SAR-specific demands and requirements on the various components of a robotic system are pictured. Current research and development in SAR robotics is outlined, and an overview of robotic systems and sub-systems currently in use in SAR and disaster response scenarios is given. Finally we show a number of possible research directions for SAR robots, which might change the overall design and operation of SAR robotics in the longer-term future. All this is meant to support our main idea of taking SAR applications as an applied benchmark for the Field Robotics (FR) domain.

Staged at Piombino, Italy in September 2015, euRathlon 2015 was the world's first multi-domain (air, land and sea) multi-robot search and rescue competition. In a mock-disaster scenario inspired by the 2011 Fukushima NPP accident, the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge required teams of robots to cooperate to map the area, find missing workers and stem a leak. In this paper we outline the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge and the approach used to benchmark and score teams. We conclude the paper with an evaluation of both the competition and the performance of the robot-robot teams in the Grand Challenge.

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.