ResQ Freiburg: Team Description and Evaluation

ResQ Freiburg is the world champion of the 2004 RoboCup competition in the Rescue simulation league. RoboCupRescue is a large-scale multi-agent simulation of urban disasters where, in order to save lives and minimize damage, rescue teams must effectively cooperate despite sensing and communication limitations. To accomplish this, ResQ Freiburg introduced new methods for hierarchical path planning, death-time prediction of civilians, coordination of multi-agent city exploration, as well as an any-time rescue sequence optimization based on genetic algorithms. To evaluate the usefulness of these techniques we performed an extensive evaluation of the log files of the best participating teams in the competition. Our analysis explains the reasons for our team’s success, and thus could also provide an evaluation tool for future competitions.