Over $1 million for I-Rescue Research Project

Prof. Austin Tate and his I-X/I-Rescue Team in AIAI have just been awarded a further $265,000 grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the remainder of the work in 2005. They will work on using I-X for Personnel Recovery and Search and Rescue Training with the US Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) Joint Personnel Recovery Agency's (JPRA) Personnel Recovery Education and Training Centre (PRETC), based in Fredericksburg, Virginia. This brings the total funding for 2004-5 to date to $650,000. Further work valued at $400,000 is anticipated in 2006. The Planning and Activity Management Group studies representations and reasoning mechanisms for inter-agent activity support. Its I-Rescue research includes a range of projects at many levels in emergency response and support, such as the Collaborative Operations for Personnel Recovery (Co-OPR) project. The group's long term aim is:

The creation and use of task-centric virtual organisations involving people, government and non-governmental organisations, automated systems, grid and web services working alongside intelligent robotic, vehicle, building and environmental systems to respond to very dynamic events on scales from local to global.