"In spite of being extremely ambitious, we consider that the obtained results correspond to a full success in the pursuit of the proposed objectives.
The global and partial reports as well as the various published articles reveal that the proposed scientific and technical objectives were attained.
The fulfillment of the promised values for the scientific production indicators in a R&D project with a large development component reveal a great operational capability of the project research team.
Obviously that, in a project of this nature, it would be desirable to ensure formal guarantees of reliability and robustness to an extend that surpasses the one proposed. However, this extra effort would require significantly more means (time, person-power, and others) than the ones made available to the project."

"Os objectivos científicos previstos foram plenamente atingidos. Os resultados evidenciam grande qualidade científica, nomeadamente ao nível das publicações em revistas internacionais com referee. O projecto contribuiu para a formação de jovens investigadores e para a projecção internacional da equipa envolvida."

Members of the final evaluation board:

• (Coord.) Leonel Augusto Pires Seabra Sousa (INESC ID - Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores).
• Fernando Manuel Ferreira Lobo Pereira (DEEC, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto).
• Luis Miguel Teixeira d´Avila Pinto da Silveira (INESC ID - Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores).
• Mário Alexandre Teles de Figueiredo (Instituto de Telecomunicações - Instituto Superior Técnico).
• Nuno Miguel Gonçalves Borges de Carvalho (Instituto de Telecomunicacoes).
• Pedro Manuel Santos de Carvalho (Instituto Superior Técnico).
• Urbano José Carreira Nunes (Universidade de Coimbra).

In these final integration tests the following components were integrated:

• Knowledge-based framework for human-robots collaborative context awareness;
• Multi-robot SLAM;
• Autonomous fire outbreaks and victims detection by the mobile robots;
• Recognition of contexts about the firefighter's activity, based on a hand-held device worn by the fireman (an Android smartphone was used in the proof of concept);
• Firefighter localization by mobile robots using distance estimation based on RSSI and trilateration.

A photo taken during the experiments can be seen here. A video of the final prorotype is available here.

The reference of the article:

João Machado Santos, Micael S. Couceiro, David Portugal and Rui P. Rocha, “A Sensor Fusion Layer to Cope with Reduced Visibility in SLAM”, Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, special issue on Autonomous Robot Systems, Springer, 2015.

The reference of the extended version of the paper is:

Gonçalo S. Martins, David Portugal and Rui P. Rocha, "On the Usage of General-Purpose Compression Techniques for the Optimization of Inter-Robot Communication", In Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, 11th International Conference, ICINCO 2014 Vienna, Austria, Sep. 1-3, 2014, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering (LNEE) series, Springer-Verlag, 2015.

The reference of the paper is:

Filipe Araújo, José Santos and Rui P. Rocha, “Implementation of a Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks in Search and Rescue Robotics”, In Proc. of 2014 IEEE Wireless Days (WD'14), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Nov. 12-14, 2014.

The reference of the paper is:

David Portugal, Charles Pippin, Rui P. Rocha and Henrik Christensen, “Finding Optimal Routes for Multi-Robot Patrolling in Generic Graphs ”, In Proc. of 2014 IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2014), Chicago, Illinois, USA, Sep. 14-18, 2014.

The reference of the paper is:

João M. Santos, Micael S. Couceiro, David Portugal and Rui P. Rocha, “Fusing Sonars and LRF data to Perform SLAM in Reduced Visibility Scenarios”, In Proc. of IEEE Int. Conf. on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC 2014), Espinho, Portugal, pp. 116-121, May 14-15, 2014.