This paper proposes a novel approach for a Constructive Self-Organizing Map (SOM) based world modeling for search and rescue
operations in disaster environments. In our approach, nodes of the self organizing network consist of victim and waypoint
classes where victim denotes a human being waiting to be rescued and waypoint denotes a free space that can be reached from
the entrance of debris. The proposed approach performed better than traditional self-organizing maps in terms of both the
accuracy of the output and the learning speed. In this paper the detailed explanation of the approach and some experimental
results are given.
Keywords Search & Rescue Robotics - Self-organizing Maps - Mobile Robotics - World Modeling