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" A massive fire tears through an apartment building, sending timbers crashing to the ground and thick smoke throughout the corridors. A team of sprightly robots enters. Communicating like a group of industrious surveyors, they spread throughout the building taking measurements and, within moments, send a map of the inside to firefighters on the outside, preparing them to tackle the blaze.  This is the dream of a team of scientists collaborating with the Army Research Laboratory&amp;#039;s Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) program. It&amp;#039;s a mission to develop robots to independently explore and map a building&amp;#039;s interior before sending it wirelessly to their human creators. And though these teams of machines aren&amp;#039;t in the field yet, they soon could be ready to go where humans fear to tread, according to Henrik Christensen, a Georgia Tech researcher who leads a team making the mapping software. &amp;quot;If you go to a building and need to send in responders, you have no idea what you&amp;#039;ll find on the other side of the entrance,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;These robots allow you to get the basic layout of the building and make it much easier to send in a team.&amp;quot; Vijay Kumar, a University of Pennsylvania researcher in charge of designing software to allow the robots to decide where to go, says the bots currently in testing are 8- to 12-inch cubes. &amp;quot;They are about the size of a Roomba\u2014but a lot smarter,&amp;quot; he says. In his lab tests in buildings around campus, he has 15 to 20 of the robots working in tandem. The robots use cameras to identify doors, windows and other features in unfamiliar settings. They are also equipped with laser scanners to measure the size of walls. The robots are fully autonomous, and while there is no lead robot, they are all capable of recruiting others to cooperate. &amp;quot;When one robot comes to an intersection, it can say to a second one, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m going to go to the left if you go to the right,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Christensen says. Kumar describes his approach to teaching robots how to explore. &amp;quot;Imagine the world as a gray box where black corresponds to solid things like walls and white corresponds to open spaces. When you first enter a room, everything is gray. You can think of exploration as converting the gray\u2014the unknown\u2014to white and black\u2014the known. Every time you take measurements, you convert gray to black or white.&amp;quot;      To make a complete map, the bots use an &amp;quot;inertial measurement unit&amp;quot; that measures how far they have gone in each direction within the building and relative to one another. The robots then integrate this information into a shared local area map via simultaneous localization and mapping. Christensen says this allows them to provide maps even in areas where global positioning systems (GPS) are blocked, which could be a boon in a combat setting. When the robots have mapped out the building&amp;#039;s interior, they send the information to a human&amp;#039;s computer or handheld device using Bluetooth technology.  The researchers are also working on equipping the machines with radar to prepare them to go into a dark or smoke-filled room. They&amp;#039;ve even built robots that fly using a helicopter-like rotor, though they have yet to perfect the flying bots&amp;#039; ability to cruise around and land in rubble and debris. This summer, both Christensen and Kumar will bring their bots for testing at an Army research lab near Washington, D.C., where the researchers will try to simulate harsh conditions like those on the battlefield and see if the robots can survive and navigate. It&amp;#039;s all part of the ultimate goal\u2014designing hordes of tiny bots that could go into a dangerous place like the damaged reactor at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. The researchers plan to make palm-size robots that are cheap enough to manufacture in bulk. That way, with swarms of small robots quickly mapping interiors of buildings, losing a few of the little guys wouldn&amp;#039;t mean losing the entire system. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a6644/robot-first-responders-could-map-out-a-building-before-humans-enter/>