SIED Laboratory ("SIED" means "Intelligent Systems for Emergencies and Civil defense") is born from a collaboration between "Istituto Superiore Antincendi" (how to reach the laboratory) and the Department of Computer and Systems Science "Antonio Ruberti" of University of Rome "La Sapienza", with the goal to carry out activities to develop methodologies, techniques and tools to be used in rescue operations.

We are currently working out and experimenting to reach two specific goals:

• Simulation Systems, to build monitoring and decision supporting tools for taking actions in real time.
• Mobile Robotic Platforms, which are able to perform tasks like victims detection and exploration in post-event scenarios that are high-risky for human operators.

In order to reproduce conditions that are similar to operative ones, in our laboratory we have set up testing arenas that conform to USAR (Urban Search And Rescue) standards developed by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology).

Foligno's Map, used in Simulation Systems tests

Our robot finding a victim in Portugal 2004 RoboCupRescue competition