Rescue robots at the Collapse of the municipal archive of Cologne City: A field report

Abstract

This paper presents a field report and summarizes the problems of the appliance of rescue robots during the Collapse of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne. Two robots where on the field, ready to be applied: A shoe-box size tracked mobile robot (VGTV Xtreme) and a caterpillar like system (Active Scope Camera). Due to the special type of collapse and design limitations of the robots, both robotic systems could not be applied. Either they could not reach/fit into voids or could not be controlled from a safe distance. The problems faced have been analyzed and are described in this paper.