(Did Google drop you here when you were actually looking for the 2009 Rescue Robotics camp? The 2009 camp is to be held in Thailand, see http://thailandrescuerobot.org/workshop/ for details!)

The Fourth Annual Rescue Robotics Camp, 2007

at Istituto Superiore Antincendi, Rome, Italy

Another October, another Rescue Robotics camp! This year the camp was held almost 4 weeks early to coincide with the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's International Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics, both hosted by Istituto Superiore Antincendi, about 6KM south of Rome. I was fortunate enough to be invited back to help out at the camp, where I was mainly attached to the Flying Robots practical. I also presented our paper on terrain feature extraction to the SSRR workshop. Oh, and I took almost 5,000 photos! :-)

If you're looking for more photos from the event, have a look at http://rrc07.raybot.net/ !

We had a great showing with practical sessions about robot simulators with NIST, walking robots with the University of Pennsylvania, flying robots with Ascending Technologies, shapechanging advanced mobility robots with Chiba Institute of Technology and Tohoku University and 3D mapping and modelling with the University of Rome "La Sapienza"!

Once again the great organisation effort by the teams from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" under Professor Daniele Nardi, the National Institute for Standards and Technologies under Adam Jacoff and International Rescue System Institute under Professor Satoshi Tadokoro paid off.

As this year's camp was held much earlier than usual, we could not be accommodated at the Institute ... I ended up at the Hotel Pace Elvezia, a short walk from Piazza Venezia in the middle of Rome ... and boy am I glad I ended up there! I got to see a lot more of Rome than I did in the past simply by taking detours to and from the metro station each day ... I should go through the 2,700 photos I took around Rome (not including the 2,000 or so photos I took during the actual events!) soon and put some of them up - in the meantime I've got a few up at my Flickr page! :-)