A brief history of robotic mapping in RoboCup Rescue

At the very beginning of RoboCup Rescue, teams usually provided a hand-drawn map of the explored area to indicate the location of detected victims after their missions. Although these hand-drawn maps may be quite enough for rescuers to find the victims but, it didn’t have any technical challenge for academic side. In 2006 the RoboCup Rescue committee decided to restrict acceptable mapping methods to the automatically generated grid mappings. Although several teams (mostly European ones) were developing SLAM algorithms even before 2006, they didn’t have a similar method to represent their mapping results. Therefore the committee standardized the mapping format to be able to quantify the accuracy and quality of these maps. With these standardized mapping formats, now the committee members are working to develop an automatic map scoring system.